He stars as a 35-year-old father on the ABC sitcom “Notes from the Underbelly,” but the 23-year-old Sunkrish Bala couldn’t feel farther from the responsibilities his serious character tackles on air.
“(The role is) hard, I mean … I’m very much in my early 20s but still behaving like I’m 12,” he said.
Bala himself is jocular and mellow. “Dude,” “buddy” and “sweet” regularly find their way into the speech of the 2006 UCLA theater graduate, who still lives in his college apartment in Westwood.
And though Bala tells the story of his career success by painting himself as an uncommonly lucky idiot savant, his friends and acquaintances insist that his insouciant, goofball personality masks a spartan work ethic.
“He’s very driven,” said Tom Fonss, a former UCLA theater student and Bala’s roommate. “From very early on he was working at getting his career going, finding an agent, going to showcases and just putting himself out there.”
Bala’s hard work earned him guest spots on shows such as “CSI,” “Will and Grace” and “My Name is Earl.” He also had a memorable stint on “Grey’s Anatomy” as a guy with a never-ending erection, which led to a starring role on ABC’s “Notes from the Underbelly,” now in its second season.
“He’s great at meeting people, and he has the talent and the brains to play any role he’s cast in,” said UCLA theater Professor Gary Gardner, one of Bala’s former professors.
However, had it not been for Kal Penn, a fellow Bruin alumnus, this promising young actor would be an electrical engineer, a path he seemed to have been set on since childhood.
Bala grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley in a traditional Indian family. His parents had hopes that he would attend a prestigious college and become a successful businessman, but they instinctively knew that he was headed in a different direction.
“Even when he was in first, second grade, all throughout school, he acted every single year. We saw his drama and everything, he was really special, and very good,” said Bala’s mother, Jaya Balasubramanian.
Acting quickly became a part of Bala’s life. While attending high school, he helped start a theater company called A’shore Productions to provide a voice for a fledgling Indian-American community. The company was the first of its kind on the West Coast.
“Being East Indian and looking how I looked, I couldn’t always get the parts I wanted to play. … And there was this very new Indian community that just had no voice. So we got together in a community effort to tell Southeast Asian stories,” Bala said.
Bala was an aspiring actor in every aspect but name, never seeing it as more than a hobby.
“I just never thought I could pursue acting as a profession. … I was very nerdy, very studious. I was that kid who was going to go to an Ivy League school and become a doctor or an engineer,” Bala said.
However, a fateful meeting with another Indian actor and UCLA alumnus enabled Bala to see his dream as a possible reality.
Bala was handing out fliers to promote an A’shore production at an Indian cultural event when he came across 1999 UCLA graduate Penn of “The Namesake” and “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” fame.
The two struck up a conversation and Penn voiced something that the younger actor had in some way been aware of all along.
“He just told me, “˜You don’t want to be an engineer; you obviously love this and you’ve been doing this all your life.’ After that I wanted to do it for real,” Bala said.
Midway through his senior year in high school, he changed his listed major to theater on all of his active applications. His friends and family soon accepted his newfound ardor.
“Initially we were not sure that (theater) was something he should pursue,” said Bala’s father, Mummirpallam Balasubramanian. “But he kept saying, “˜I hope you won’t say no, I hope you won’t say no.’ So we said yes.”
The decision seems to be a good one: In the past five years, Bala has worked hard enough to dispel any parent’s misgivings.
While at UCLA, he began an acting troupe with his friends that played shows at the Northwest Campus Auditorium. He worked as sound crew in one of Gardner’s UCLA productions, and also took a leading role in a production of the East West Players, a local Asian-American theater troupe.
During his sophomore year, Bala co-starred with Bollywood legend Anupam Ker in the feature film “American Blend,” and he recently wrapped production on “Albino Farm,” an indie horror film. Both films will be released in 2008.
“I visited him once on set. … He’s very businesslike ““ he has to be, that’s his work. He takes acting very seriously,” Fonss said. “(But) he’s not sitting at home in a black turtleneck smoking a cigarette. He’s a very, very funny, lighthearted human being.”