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.

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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.

You spent six years researching and hoping for the main role in Life of Pi , but the director went with someone else. How did you move on? I got a job at a paper store in downtown Toronto where I actually bought paper for calligraphy. I was lethargically dragging myself through life, and I was talking to the manager one day. She knew I did calligraphy and said, “We should have a calligraphy event in the store where whatever customers buy, for one day only, they can bring it to your table and you can do calligraphy on it.” So we did that, and it was a huge success. There was a line outside the store, and there was a wedding planner in that line. When she saw what I was doing, she was like, “Why aren’t you doing this full-time?”

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Chalk is an ephemeral medium. Do you love or hate that about it? To me, chalk is a medium that’s been very, very inspiring because I don’t hesitate doing anything on the wall, knowing that I can just erase it. Whereas when I’m doing pen and ink stuff, I have to do it so carefully. Sometimes I’ll be doing something that’s taken six hours, then all of a sudden for whatever reason the nib breaks and ink splatters everywhere.

How do you approach choosing artwork for your own apartment? My apartment is a little treasure box of my artistic life. I have a cutting board that says “staff of life” and it’s a copy of a breadboard from 1820 that I made from a tree that I cut down and turned on a lathe and spent three months carving. I have cloth that I’ve woven from wool that I’ve spun from sheep that I’ve sheared. That’s what this apartment is.

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Is there any chalk art in your home? When I moved to New York, I wanted to live in an old apartment, and I found a prewar place that was perfect for me. The little entrance hallway in my apartment is small but has high ceilings. When I moved in, I instantly knew: I’m going to paint this in chalkboard paint and do paneling on it. [Designer] Garrow Kedigian saw that and said, “I want to do this one day in a whole room.”

What’s your go-to chalk? Crayola white chalk. I don’t use anything else.