Characters from the Harold & Kumar movies.
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The titular duo
Tropes about both of them
- All Men Are Perverts: They both passionately love porn and strip clubs, and will stop to stare at naked women's breasts in any situation such as while running from security guards who caught them guilty of smoking cannabis on campus grounds.
- Hero with Bad Publicity:
- In "White Castle", the police give them a hard time just for their ethnicity and Kumar's name.
- In the second movie, they get labelled as terrorists (from a supposed joint collaboration between North Korea and al-Qaeda) by the racist, idiotic Deputy of Homeland Security Ron Fox.
- Harold continues to be this in the third movie where he has become a Wall Street executive and is targeted by angry unemployed people who blame Wall Street for ending their jobs right before Christmas to maximize their end-of-year profits.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Kumar is the red, Harold is the blue, although whenever they fight, they switch because Harold can be a lot more rambunctious when they argue.
- Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: Harold is responsible, mature and hard-working; Kumar is lazy, childish and wasted all his money on marijuana. Ironically, Harold is the unluckier one.
- Straight Man and Wise Guy: Harold (straight man) and Kumar (wise guy).
- Vitriolic Best Buds: The two of them fight more than an a couple that's been married for years, but they're the closest of friends.
- Trademark Favorite Food: The White Castle sliders. In fact, they each order 30 sliders with fries and Cherry Cokes/Diet Cokes and eat them all in one sitting.
Harold Lee
Played by: John Cho
- Butt-Monkey: His main characteristic is being unlucky, and usually ends up getting more abuse than Kumar.
- Chivalrous Pervert: He's as perverted as Kumar, but tries to be as polite as possible.
- Drugs Are Bad: Zigzagged. In the first movie, he did smoke marijuana happily but the events of the first and second movies made him start to hate marijuana and blame it for the problems it's caused him. When the third movie starts, it turns out that Harold's completely given up on marijuana but Santa Claus convinces him that he shouldn't.
- Extreme Doormat: He starts out as one at first, but eventually grows a spine and learns to stand up for himself.
- Grew a Spine: He finally learns to stand up for himself by the end of the first movie and be more bold.
- Happily Married: To Maria by the third movie.
- I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: In college he had an emo/goth style with bangs and a sarcastic shirt about Y2K.
- In-Series Nickname: "Rold" and "Roldy".
- Lovable Coward: At least in the first movie. He's too kind-hearted to stand up to anybody, not even to his accountant co-workers who foisted their own work upon him to do for the weekend or the racist cop who gave him an exorbitant jaywalking ticket.
- Nice Guy: Compared to Kumar, who is more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Harold is generally more selfless and friendly.
- Only Sane Man: Around Kumar, Neil Patrick Harris and secondary characters such as Freakshow.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Harold spends a lot of time in all 3 movies telling off Kumar what's wrong with him.
- Wealthy Ever After: Harold started out as an investment banker in the beginning of the series. Between the second and third movies, he becomes a Wall Street corporate executive and moved out of Kumar's apartment and into a nice two or three-story house and marries Maria.
Kumar Patel
Played by: Kal Penn
- Berserk Button: Given his Indian ethnicity, Kumar doesn’t take too kindly to racial profiling or stereotyping.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: He's academically gifted, did well in medical school, earned perfect MCAT scores but would much rather just relax and smoke weed and rely on his father for income.
- Deadpan Snarker: Almost any interaction with Harold has him give a snarky line.
- Genius Ditz: Smart enough to convincingly impersonate a surgeon and save the life of a man with gunshot wounds on the operating table. Dumb enough to bring illegal drugs onto an airplane and then try to smoke them in the bathroom.
- The Hedonist: Harold loves weed, and is far more obsessed with it than Harold is.
- Hidden Depths: Kumar is actually a brilliant medical student and actually wants to be a doctor, but doesn't want to conform to the stereotype of Indians being doctors.
- In-Series Nickname: "Mar".
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's selfish, irresponsible and lazy, but he genuinely cares about Harold and actually tries to save him when he gets arrested.
- Loser Protagonist: He lived off his father's money for most of his life, and then when he blew all his job interviews to become a doctor his father cut him off. In the third movie, he becomes poor, unemployed and Vanessa dumps him.
- Manchild: Vanessa calls him one in "Christmas", ordering him to grow up and go back to medical school.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's always him who's getting Harold and himself into trouble.
- Shipper on Deck:
- He's constantly encouraging Harold to grow some balls and ask Maria out. In the sequel, it was his idea for them to travel to Amsterdam so Harold could spend more time with her after they started dating. Although, it was also because marijuana was legalized there as well.
- A more minor example is with Cindy Kim, mostly because he thinks Harold needs to get laid.
- The Stoner: Even more so than Harold, he enthusiastically loves marijuana.
- Ungrateful Bastard: To both Harold and his father as he takes advantage of both of them.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Turns out that Kumar used to be as clean cut and straight-laced as Harold back when he was in college. That is, until he met Vanessa Fanning, who introduced to weed and turned him into the slacker he is today.
Recurring characters
Neil Patrick Harris
Played by: Neil Patrick Harris
- Adam Westing: He plays a hedonistic pervert who only pretends to be gay.
- Advertised Extra: In the third movie, he only appears once despite being heavily advertised in the movie's poster.
- As Himself: Defied due to the character being extremely far removed from the actor's real personality. The real Harris actually requested to be credited as playing "Neil Patrick Harris" rather than "As Himself".
- Bullying a Dragon: He branded a prostitute at a brothel he was already banned from, and so Sally, the proprietor of the brothel, shoots him in the back then head with a double-barrel shotgun.
- Chekhov's Gun: In the first movie. After taking off with Harold and Kumar's car, he shows up just in the nick of time to buy the duo's food (after they finally make it to White Castle, only to realize that they don't have any money).Neil Patrick Harris: It's the least I can do.
- Chick Magnet: Is able to entertain women with his great looks and charm, and even used magic to entertain and steal Jesus Christ's girlfriends.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Whether or not it's the result of heavy drug abuse, Neil is very... out there.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He steals Harold's car and takes it for a joyride with nude strippers. Then at White Castle when Harold and Kumar arrive but without the money to buy food, Neil redeems himself by providing $250 to Harold ($50 for the food, $200 for damages he made to the car).
Andy Rosenberg and Seth Goldstein
Played by: Eddie Kaye Thomas and David Krumholtz
Harold and Kumar's two Jewish friends who are always together.
- All Men Are Perverts: They're even bigger perverts than Harold and Kumar, willing to forgo eating if it means they can see Katie Holmes nude on TV.
- Boomerang Bigot: Goldstein after converting to Christianity starts spewing harsh anti-Semitic sentiments, despite that he's still a Jew by ethnicity.
- Burger Fool: Kumar said that Goldstein used to work at Burger Shack.
- Hero of Another Story: They had their own offscreen adventures, "Rosenberg and Goldstein go to Hot Dog Heaven", while Harold and Kumar were going to White Castle. The film's producers wanted to materialize that into a movie (yes, with that exact title) but it somehow never got off the ground.
- Hypocritical Humor: They joke that Harold and Kumar must be a gay couple, when they themselves aren't so different from Harold and Kumar and even share the same bong to blow on right after making that statement.
- Meaningful Name: Their surnames are modernizations of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the archetypal Those Two Guys who are Heroes Of Another Story.
- Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: In the third movie, their friendship went downhill because Goldstein converted to Christianity and undid a lot of what Judaism did for him, making Rosenberg protest that he's still a Jew by heritage. Though for some reason they didn't split up because of this.
- Those Two Guys: Are always seen together.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Hot dogs from Hot Dog Heaven. (Most likely were Kosher since they were both Jewish in 2004).
Maria Perez-Lee
Played by: Paula Garces
Harold's girlfriend and eventual wife.
- Babies Ever After: She is pregnant at the end of the third movie (and trilogy, in conclusion).
- Nice Girl: She is constantly happy, nice to everyone, and has nothing to complain about dating Harold who is a Nice Guy and treats her right all the time.
Vanessa Fanning
Played by: Danneel Ackles
Kumar's ex-girlfriend, who he is reunited with in the second movie.
- The Stoner: She's the one who introduced Kumar to weed in the first place.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
George W. Bush
Played by: James Adomian
The 43rd President of the United States who was president at the time the first two movies were released.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's immature, criminalizes weed but likes to smoke it himself but he helps pardon Harold and Kumar for their falsified crime charges and even asks if there's anything else he can do for them.
- Our Presidents Are Different: He's a combination of President Unmodified and President Personable. He's a depiction of the then-sitting U.S. president, and when he learns about the duo's troubles with the law he pardons them both.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: While he's not much of a prudent person, he did help Harold and Kumar expunge their criminal record of crimes they never committed.
- Unseen No More: He was first alluded to in the first movie by a T-shirt Kumar was wearing. At the end of the second movie, he pops up in-person.
