Entertainment Weekly broke the story more than 24 hours ago. Ben Smith picked up on it around 11 a.m. yesterday. I first saw it at OTB later in the day.

In short, actor Kal Penn — of the “Harold and Kumar” movies and the hit FOX series “House” (an Abel family favorite) — has left the latter for a much different house: He’ll be an associate director in the White House office of public liaison, the team responsible for building bridges between the President and his diverse constituencies. Penn will focus on the Asian-American, Pacific-Islander, and arts constituencies.

In a semi-intriguing, semi-tangential case of art reflecting life, Penn’s character on the “House” series committed suicide in Monday night’s episode, leaving behind no note and no explanation, driving home the age-old lesson that, as well as we think we know each other, we don’t. Similarly, for those (like me) who were not aware of Penn’s interest in politics and his prior work for the Obama campaign, who only knew him as the comedic Kumar or aspiring Dr. Kutner — there’s a similar, if less-substantial story: As neatly as we think a certain minor celebrity might fit into a particular box, we could be terribly wrong.

Case in point, from Penn’s exclusive with EW:

I’ve been thinking about [moving into politics] for a while. I love what I do as an actor. I couldn’t love it more. But probably from the time I was a kid, I really enjoyed that balance between the arts and public service. I went to a performing arts high school, but I still took a bunch of those dorky political science classes. It’s probably because of the value system my grandparents instilled in me. They marched with Gandhi in the Indian independence movement, and that was always in the back of my head. So the past couple of years I thought about it a little more. And in ’06 I started this international studies program at Stanford, where they actually let you do most of the course work online. So it was something I could do while I was acting. And I thought this might be the right time to go off and do something else.

If nothing else, perhaps these complementary slices of art and life will encourage all of us to pause, next time, before we leap to judgement about the content of someone else’s character, be it a private friend or public persona.