Mean Girls star shares reason why he left Hollywood

‘I felt dead inside for a long time,’ actor says after not getting selected as the lead in ‘Life of Pi’

Rajiv Surendra says he felt like ‘someone had died’ when he didn’t bag the role (Rajiv Surendra/Instagram)

Mean Girls star Rajiv Surendra has shared the reason why he left Hollywood.

The former actor, famously known for playing the role of rapping mathlete Kevin Gnapoor in Mean Girls, left the industry because he wasn’t selected as the lead in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi.

“While we were shooting Mean Girls during my first year of college, I found out they were turning Life of Pi into a film,” Surendra told GQ.

“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.”

However, the film lost its first director and the project was put on hold. So Surendra went back to college.

“I used college as an excuse. I’m just going to wait until they are getting Life of Pi ready and as soon as the movie is underway, if I get the part, I’ll just drop out of school again,” Surendra said. “The project kept getting delayed. Three months turned into a year, which turned into four years. It was actually six years because of that year off.

“So every time a new director (came aboard), I’d go to the library and get out all the movies they had made and research that director,” Surendra added. “I worked really really hard to try to get this part. In the end, they gave it to somebody else.”

Approximately 3,000 people auditioned for the lead role in Life of Pi, according to Variety. The part eventually went to Suraj Sharma.

Surendra said he felt like “someone had died” when he didn’t bag the role.

“I felt like someone had died,” he said. “Very slowly over the course of six years, 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. Those old Tamil songs I listened to as a kid, Pi would’ve listened to those songs.

“It was traumatic. I think I was in shock for a couple weeks. I felt dead inside for a long time.”

Life of Pi was released in 2012.

The fiction film is based on the life of Pi Patel, who finds a way to survive in a lifeboat adrift in the middle of nowhere. His fight against the odds is heightened by the company of a male Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.