Memories From The Set: Jean Villepique
jean-villepique-30-rock
30 ROCK
As NBC therapist Suzanne Hocker, Villepique had a front-row seat to Jack's role-playing during Tracy's session, which quickly turned into a Good Times-tinged farce (and later nabbed Alec Baldwin a Lead Actor Comedy Emmy). "I was completely terrified to meet Alec Baldwin," she says. "I mean, it was my second job." Villepique remembers that her mother paid for her plane ticket to New York (because she couldn't afford it) and that she couldn't have lived with herself if she didn't try for a moment with the episode's other guest star: Carrie Fisher. "I knew better," she says, laughing. "She was just like, 'Thank you,' completely nice, but just like, 'Please, kid, knock first or something.' I fangirled all over her. That's gross, but I couldn't help it."
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BETTER CALL SAUL
Villepique remembers that Bob Odenkirk "did not really talk to me" in the lead-up to their Season 3 scene, which finds Jimmy sobbing to an insurance agent in a calculated move to get Chuck in trouble — but she totally understood why. "He had to cry in the scene, and it's a long scene. So I was just like, 'I am going to not mess up my words. I'm just going to give him what he needs from this side.'" After the cameras had captured Odenkirk's performance and were turned around to shoot Villepique's reactions, she remembers, the atmosphere lightened a bit. Between takes, "He was so warm," she says, adding that based on his reputation in the comedy community, she wasn't surprised. "Enough people really love him that I didn't have fears of him."
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THE CARMICHAEL SHOW
Villepique played a therapist once more ("I guess it's in my wheelhouse") when Loretta Devine's Cynthia got some help for her depression in "The Blues." The Season 2 episode earned critical acclaim for its handling of a tough topic. "It was a privilege to be there," Villepique says. "A lot of my work is being the straight woman, and at the end, the director was like, 'Just go ahead and play.' And I was like, 'I'm a guest here, truly, so I'm not going to pull out my bag of tricks and try to make this really funny.' It was a lovely moment, and I didn't want to ham it up with my ham."
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CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
Villepique built her comedy foundation at Chicago's Second City, as did Curb's Jeff Garlin, "and I think he had advocated for me" to get the part of a nurse who's around when his character goes into surgery for relief from his snoring but winds up with a completely shaved head. "He was very grounding, but it wasn't like, 'Hey, we're going to improvise like we do on stage,'" she says. Given the time and budget constraints of shooting Larry David's HBO comedy, "it's not just an improv free-for-all, " she adds. "People ended up feeding me lines, and I was like, 'Whatever! Whatever needs to happen.'"
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NEW GIRL
"It was really fun to play a weirdo" in a Season 6 episode of the Fox ensemble comedy, Villepique says; she filled the role of Deb, a "UPS driver that was kind of gross and scary." The gig stands out in her mind for a few reasons. First, series star Lamorne Morris "is from Chicago, and he was so friendly," she recalls. "He reached out." And second, Deb's uniform saved Villepique a ton of time. "It was the quickest wardrobe fitting I ever had... They were like, 'Try these on.' It was black pants and a brown top. They were like, 'That'll do.'"
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THE OFFICE
Villepique was visiting Los Angeles when someone suggested she get in touch with the NBC series' casting director. "I was like, 'You can't just call casting directors!'" she says, laughing. Nevertheless, the gamble worked: She was cast as David Wallace's wife, Rachel, in Season 3. Villepique credits pal Scott Adsit, who'd shot an episode of the workplace comedy the season before, with giving her the lowdown on how to handle herself on set. And she says she'll be forever grateful to stars Rainn Wilson and Steve Carell for putting her at ease — not that it helped much when she was having a hard time keeping it together in a cocktail-party scene. "I kept breaking, because I was like, 'This is so much fun!' and I think people were like, 'We're working here,'" she says, chuckling. "There's definitely a moment... where they cut to me and my face was bright red" from laughing. Oh, and the director on Villepique's first-ever TV episode? J.J. Abrams. Perhaps you've heard of him?
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VEEP
For a comedic actress, the HBO series "is a dream show, obviously," Villepique says. She recurred as a New York Times reporter in the White House press corps; as such, she often shared scenes with fellow Chicagoan Matt Walsh, who plays sometime press secretary Mike McLintock. She recalls getting to shoot a scene with him — alas, it was cut from the episode — and thinking, "He could improvise all day long," she says. "I felt like I was getting to play basketball with Michael Jordan or something... I think I floated home, like, 'I got to do that. I got to play.'"
A.P. Bio - Season 1
A.P. BIO
"I wish we played with the kids more," Villepique says of her current job. "Hopefully, if we get a Season 2, we'll get to be in the classroom [more], because the students are so wonderful and brilliant actors."
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GREY'S ANATOMY
The ABC medical saga "was the first drama I did, so I was just a fly on the wall. I had that feeling of, 'Do I look like a serious actress?'" Villepique says. The one-day gig allowed her to work with a friend (episode director David Greenspan), wear a nurse's scrubs and listen in as the show's regulars discussed (wait for it) Grey's fan fiction. "They were like, 'This is crazy. Our characters are hooking up in their fan fiction,'" she says. "And I was like, 'That exists?' I'm so naïve."