Karan Brar smiles wide as he races to the front door of his family’s Bothell home, hair flopping slightly above his eyes, extending his right hand for a strong shake.
He may be only 12 years old, stand only 4-foot-4 ½ inches tall and have a playful demeanor, but he also resembles a little man who means business.
Brar’s latest project is “Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules” (he also appears in the first installment), which opened at No. 1 at the box office the weekend of March 25-27. He plays Chirag Gupta in the movies based on Jeff Kinney’s popular books focusing on main character Greg Heffley’s tough, but also victorious middle-school experiences.
“Wimpy Kid” may be successful, but Brar isn’t one to believe he’s larger than life even though he graces the big screen.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re bigger than a camera man or something, you’ve got to stay nice, and you’re no different than any other person,” Brar said, his voice rising. “All you’re on is just a piece of film and it’s just shipped around the U.S. Sometimes, I look and see those divas, they’ll just act really mean and they’ll just have that attitude as a person, which is wrong.”
Added father, Harinder: “He’s the same person. It didn’t change anything, but he learned a lot of things — learned a lot of skills working with very experienced people.
“At age 11, he was thanking every single person on the set every day when you go home, saying, ‘Thank you so much that I have a chance to work with you,’” he added. “That attitude we teach him and we learned ourselves.”
The Brar family has lived in north Bothell for about three years and Karan attends Gateway Middle School near Everett. Harinder and wife, Jasbinder, moved to Washington from India, and Karan was born in Redmond. Daughter Sabreena, 13, rounds out the family.
Harinder worked in the theater in college and asked Karan if he wanted to give acting a shot at age 7. He took acting classes, attending workshops and landing a few roles in commercials for the Dalai Lama’s “Seeds of Compassion Campaign,” Shell Gas and Committee for Children.
“Actually, I hated acting at first,” Karan said. “I just felt like it was really time consuming. I really didn’t know what acting could develop into — what’s the bigger picture of acting. Over the years, it sort of came into my mind that if I do acting, I have a bigger future for me. It’s something I love and I’ll be doing for a long time.”
The “Wimpy Kid” films have been his top projects so far, and he’s been riding that wave of success by frequenting Los Angeles for auditions lately. Karan’s film experience began in the summer of 2009 after impressing the producers and director and winning the Chirag role out of a throng of 9,000 young hopefuls. Filming for both movies took place in Vancouver, B.C., for about 2 ½ months over the last two summers.
Karan is a fan of all five “Wimpy Kid” books and said he’s on board with a third movie and beyond if that happens. For now, he’s immersed in acting and the friendships he’s formed with his castmates.
On playing Chirag, he noted: “He’s a little bit of friend and enemy (to Greg). I just come in once in a while and sometimes I bother him, sometimes I’m friends with him.
“We all have to relate (to our characters), we had to think, ‘OK, yeah, what is this person thinking in their head?’ And as you take different roles, you’re being literally a different person.”
From the set to the stage when winning the Best Ensemble Cast award at the 32nd Annual Young Actors Awards in Los Angeles last month, Karan said the actors have bonded and become like a family.
Karan has had especially nice conversations with Zachary Gordon, who plays Greg, about films and other topics. He names Gordon as a solid actor, but also gives Will Smith a nod as one of his favorites — calling his work “dead amazing” — especially in “Hitch.”
His one freak-out star sighting so far was when he ran into Vanessa Hudgens of “High School Musical” fame in the elevator three times in one day while filming “Wimpy Kid.”
Many classmates at Gateway know Karan’s movie work full well, but he’s got his tight-knit coterie of friends who ask a few questions about filming and then they get on with their normal life of playing video games and having water-gun fights and so on.
“My friends, they try to treat me the same, but if it’s literally like strangling me every single day — like just bothering me, like rapidly just chasing me around the school — it gets a little annoying,” Karan said of overzealous classmates. “It’s always bothering if somebody’s like, they’re just thinking I’m literally their wind-up toy to say any lines they want.”
As for Harinder, he’s proud of both Karan’s acting prowess and his top grades in school (he shines in 10th-grade algebra as a sixth-grader).
He recalls the local “Wimpy Kid” showing that he and his family attended.
“With all the friends from school, the theater was packed,” he began, “And the first time I ever saw my kid on the big screen, the tears were coming out of our eyes.”
