NEW YORK — Some stars spend Sundays lounging by the pool. For Jack McBrayer, who plays naive page Kenneth Parcell on the NBC sitcom “30 Rock” (Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. on Channel 9), Sunday means grabbing a bottle of Tide and heading to the laundry room. And maybe later a shopping trip to Best Buy.
McBrayer has clearly not gone Hollywood. After all, it wasn’t long ago that he was subsisting on dinners of Fig Newtons or spinach eaten right out of the can. “Tina Fey called me a hobo,” he jokes about his early struggling-actor days in New York.
The Georgia native became friends with Fey, the star of “30 Rock,” and her husband, Jeff Richmond, while doing improv with Second City in Chicago. It was Richmond, now a producer on “30 Rock,” who persuaded McBrayer to move to the Big Apple for a play he was mounting.
McBrayer accepted, but once the play ended, things were pretty lean. It wasn’t until a friend from Second City who was writing for Conan O’Brien suggested McBrayer for a sketch on the show that things began to improve. More appearances on O’Brien’s show followed, as well as other TV and movie roles. Last year, he finally attracted attention with a showy role in the film “Talladega Nights,” and then with his breakout role on “30 Rock.”
Q: Given that the show is still trying to find an audience, were you surprised when it won the Emmy?
A: Well, yes. Pretty much all of last season was based on fear — fear of being canceled at any minute because the ratings were so tragically low. But when we did get all those Emmy nominations, that was a real boost. We were like, “We’re not crazy. Our comedy instincts aren’t completely off.”
Q: You’ve had a very interesting resume, starting with your first job at a pool liner manufacturing company. I guess from there you can only go up.
A: I would hope so, or else that would be pretty grim. And then I started working in the restaurant business. And then temping. I pretty much kept temping up until “30 Rock.” In fact, when I went back to California after we shot the pilot I went back to temping because you never know how that’s going to pan out. It was pretty cush temping, like wrapping Christmas presents.
Q: Is it true that you’ve become very popular with the pages at NBC?
A: I knew that they were psyched that they were being represented on TV. Then the more episodes that went on and the more ridiculous the stunts became that I did on the show, I thought, oh, this is going to turn quickly. As it turns out, they’ve still been loyal.
Q: Have the writers drawn on some of the pages’ actual experiences for scripts, such as the episode last season involving Brian Williams’ dressing room?
A: I can’t imagine what would have inspired Tina Fey to (write about trashing) Williams’ dressing room. The funny thing is that I had never met Williams, but after that episode aired, I saw him in Rockefeller Center, and he came up to me and said, “If you ever disgrace me like that again I will have your head.” Turns out, he was totally doing a bit. Brian Williams is the funniest man at NBC.
