A Formally-Trained Thesp Trades in collegiate Mirth

   A cross-section of the bibliophiles inspecting the contents of this fine and upstanding periodical would reveal a university-educated preponderance, swaddled in Gucci ascots and puffing skull-and-bones flavored cigars as they ponder Jung on their yachts. Community college rejects they are not. When Dan Harmon’s semi-autobiographical comedy-on-meth sitcom Community hit the air running in September of 2009, the premise revolved around Greendale Community College and the attendees of a Spanish study group who all have some defect or past dereliction that has funneled them into the lower layers of the higher education system.
    It’s with a heavy dose of the absurd, then, that the main female lead, Britta Perry, is portrayed by theatrically trained Juilliard alum Gillian Jacobs, a pretty, bashful blonde who keeps pushing golden locks from her eyes across the table at a Larchmont café in a preppy section of Los Angeles. “I definitely thought I was just going to be a theater actor,” Jacobs reflects. “Certainly Juilliard is prepping people to be theater actors and everything in my life was going on that path.  Then I started getting more jobs in film and TV after I graduated, and I really liked it, and it felt challenging in a different way because I had never been on camera before.”    
    She says all this in the controlled and mannered way of a trained performer. No words are tripped on; no stumbles roll awkwardly off the tongue the entire interview. And yet, despite acting since her Pittsburgh childhood—playing a cancer victim in a hospital commercial at 13, a racist girl in an educational video produced by Mr. Rogers’ production company, and being slapped by invisible hands as a poltergeist-haunted girl on a “real haunted house” TV program—there is still a sense of newness to her being the object of attention, having just recently been recognized on the street for the first time (someone said she “looked like that girl from that sitcom”), and still being starstruck in a chance encounter with RuPaul.
    It’s the sort of comic conversation one might have with a seasoned sitcom vet, which Jacobs is not, but she’s had to come correct since Community features comic hero Chevy Chase and has seen guest spots from the likes of Jack Black, Patton Oswalt, Paul F. Tompkins, and Andy Dick. “I definitely feel like I’ve gotten sharper and faster since doing Community,” she explains, “and just being around all these people all the time, like [co-stars] Donald Glover and Joel [McHale] and Chevy. I feel like it’s made me quicker. I don’t know if I’m any funnier, but your brain starts to work at a faster pace being in that environment. I’d always wanted to do a comedy but it was the first time anyone actually cast me in it.”