As the prickly, rigid and quite frequently foolish community college student Britta Perry, Gillian Jacobs has a repertoire on "Community" that has ranged from paintball to tap-dancing to sex with Joel McHale's character -- a varied terrain that makes perfect sense given Britta's neurotic backstory, which includes foot modeling, billboard vandalism and dropping out of high school to impress Radiohead.
The sophomore comedy from creator Dan Harmon has acquired a small but devoted following, which includes enough critics to have landed the show three Critics Choice Television Award nominations. If it's still a longshot for Emmy recognition, stranger things have happened -- and, in fact, stranger things continue to happen every week at Greendale Community College, where the show is set.
You've had a very unconventional career path: you did Shakespeare and studied at Julliard, then you had a stretch where you played a lot of strippers and hookers, and now you're doing comedy on TV. You planned it that way, right?
No. (laughs) I mean, I will say that after my stretch of playing lost girls, I was certainly looking to do comedy. My psyche couldn't handle another one of those movies. I wasn't necessarily looking to do comedy on TV, but I don't think it's an accident that I ended up on "Community."
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Was it hard to persuade casting directors that you were capable of comedy?
Yeah. I'd go in and say, "What I really want to do is comedy," and they'd kind of raise their eyebrow and give me a look. It's like an actor saying, "But what I really want to do is direct." I think that sometimes they have to sort of have already seen you do it to think thst you can do it. So yeah, I wasn’t getting a ton of those parts.
But thankfully, now I can walk into a room, and even if they haven’t seen "Community" I can say, "Look at this episode and this episode," and give people an idea of what I can do. It's such a blessing in this town, where you see actors showing up in hospital scrubs to play doctors. You've got to get as literal as you can get to convince people sometimes that you can do something.
So how did you persuade them that you could do it?
I think I was just a good fit, you know? The character was a natural entrée into the world of comedy. She's a girl who isn't necessarily funny – she's laughed at more than laughed with.
Sometimes in TV, they don’t want to see you trying as an actor. And because Britta was a more principled, rigid, putting-herself-on-a-pedestal character, that was not so dissimilar, maybe, from what I could do as an actor. And then as the series has gone on, the character has evolved naturally and allowed me to stretch comedically.
