Paramount Pictures, Twitter/RajivSurendra
- Rajiv Surendra played hilariously memorable character Kevin G in "Mean Girls."
- He said that after 'Mean Girls,' he had a career rejection that altered the course of his life.
- Surendra would live in Europe for a year and work as an au pair, which helped him heal and move on.
Rajiv Surendra was front and center in one of the most iconic scenes in the one of the most iconic movies from the early 2000s — he played mathlete Kevin G in the fan-favorite film, "Mean Girls," and delivered the math-rap that audiences loved to memorize.
However, after his hilarious turn in the film, Surendra was absent from Hollywood for the decades that followed the film's release.
In a recent interview with GQ, he explained why. Surendra experienced a career rejection after filming "Mean Girls" that would disrupt his desire to be an actor at all, when a role he'd spent years preparing for went to another actor.
"While we were shooting 'Mean Girls' during my first year of college, I found out they were turning 'Life of Pi' into a film. I was determined to get that part. So I dropped out of college to go to the little town in India where the book takes place so that I could do some in-depth research," he said — but the project was put on hold.
"Three months turned into a year turned into four years. It was actually six years because of that year off." During that stretch of time, Surendra spent years studying a different director every time a new one was attached to the project, figuring he'd just drop out of college again whenever it was time to shoot the film.
The rejection hit hard
His admirable dedication to playing the role of his dreams ultimately did not yield the results he was hoping for. "I worked really really hard to try to get this part. In the end, they gave it to somebody else," he said, "I felt like someone had died."
Surenda explained why the rejection hit him so hard. "I was building this boy that was a character in a book. By the end of those years, that was a real person inside of me."
After that, he tried to work a regular 9-to-5, but quickly discovered that it wasn't right for him. When he heard about the job of an au pair, he thought it might be the perfect job for him at the time. "I also just wanted to leave my life. It felt like a way to escape and to be paid," he said.
He was hired by a family in Munich to look after two children, ages 9 and 10 — and it turned out to be just what he needed. "When I moved and I saw how beautiful that city was and I got to know that family, I really loved working for them."
The "Mean Girls" star recognized how strange the choice seemed from the outside, looking in. "I just kept reminding myself how outlandish this whole thing was, having a college degree and this expectation from my family that I should go and get a real job, and dispelling and rejecting all of that and going to Europe and working for a family doing their laundry. [But] it was the thing that brought me back to life." Surendra worked with the family for a year.
Since then, Surendra's been showcasing his many DIY skills to a huge online audience via YouTube and HGTV. He said these fascinating skills of his — bookbinding, painting, and calligraphy, to name a few — aren't new. "Even when we were filming 'Mean Girls,'" he said, "they called me Martha Stewart because they knew I did pottery and knitted and everything."
Ultimately Surendra looks back at his time as an au pair as a formative experience that made him a better person.
"I think everybody has moments in their life where they're like, I hate my life," he said. "People entertain the idea of doing something else but it's scary. It's scary to risk everything and leave the security of everything you know and go to a place where you don't know anything. But you have to do that. The more you do it, the more you learn."