You likely know Rajiv Surendra for his famous rap in Mean Girls as MC mathlete Kevin Gnapoor, but 12 years later, Surendra has embraced a new career—as a multihyphenate. He’s a chalk artist, a calligrapher, a potter, and, yes, still an actor. “Since I was a little kid, if I was interested in something I just found a way of doing it, whether it was making pottery in my basement or keeping chickens in my backyard,” he says. The latest addition to his résumé: author. Surendra’s memoir, The Elephants in My Backyard (Regan Arts), hits shelves this fall. At a bakery in his New York City neighborhood, surrounded by walls decorated by the man himself, AD spoke with Surendra about how he went from movie screen to chalkboard.

Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get into calligraphy?

I started doing calligraphy when I was 12. Someone gave me a bunch of old letters from the 1800s. I just remember being so floored by how beautiful the handwriting was. I took those letters to elementary school, and I would copy the letterforms when we had to do handwriting exercises. By the time I was 15 or 16, my script looked similar to that script. It became a kind of hobby.

When did you start to take it seriously?

When I was in high school, I was pursuing a career as an actor, so when I was sending out my résumé to agents or casting directors, I’d address the envelope in beautiful script, and I’d often hear back because of it. I started realizing that writing this way had a unique ability to get people to recognize what it was I wanted to convey to them.

But it wasn’t your only hobby.

I did a lot of other things—pottery, drawing and painting. I went to an arts high school, and my specialty was pottery, but we had a music theater department and I dropped out of pottery to do music theater for a year. So I was kind of an arts slut—really, that’s what it felt like.

You were cast as the now legendary Kevin G. in 2004’s Mean Girls.

As the popularity of Mean Girls was growing over the years, I was interested in pursuing a career in acting, but it was just very, very hard to actually land roles. People would often stop me and say, “Oh, what else have you done?” and the answer was always, “Nothing.” And they’re like, “Why, you were so good in Mean Girls?” and the answer was, “Well, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Trust me, I’ve been trying.” All the while, I continued to do my other hobbies.