Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2009-10-19

Interview:
We had the pleasure of talking with Jack McBrayer (who plays Kenneth) and Robert Carlock (executive producer, writer) from NBC's 30 Rock. Check it out below!

Jack, you're so closely identified with Kenneth now and it's such a great role, on your hiatus when you're doing other things are you really trying to get away from that type of role or what are your thoughts on just other roles outside of Kenneth?

Jack McBrayer: Well unfortunately, I'm not that great of actor so pretty much I can lose the navy blazer but that's about it. No I know what I can do and I know what I like to do and they're pretty much along those same veins so until people are kind of tired of seeing that then I might flex some other muscles. But right now I'm real happy with where I am and what people are asking me to do.

Robert, one of my favorite parts of the show is, you know, the 30 Rock writer's room. And I just wanted to know does a lot of that inspiration come from the real writer's room for 30 Rock?

Robert Carlock: Oh we try to keep it a little - a little more high-brow than... We try to exercise a little more than they do I suppose. I guess that 30 Rock writer's room is our id. And then fortunately not entirely the reality. I think it's in our best interest to stay away from that version in our real lives as much as we can.

Now on the show you see kind of the games and stuff that the writers play in there and like things that they do. Now is there stuff like that going on in the actual writer's room for 30 Rock?

Robert Carlock: Yeah, not so much that. You can get punchy though, you need to fill the time. You spend, you know, so many hours in a room literally with these 11 other people and, you know, some people going in and out and they have different tasks and there's always production going on.

But, there - you know, what is - occasionally you do devolve into something. For some reason we had these two like paddle pads that you put on your hands for boxing, I don't know why they were even in the room. And then we - for some reason we had these marbles that were Star Wars marbles, again, I try to keep the room pretty bare just to limit distractions because these people can be very child-like and easily distracted.

But somehow they invented a game where you would wear this paddle on your hand and then throw the marble to someone who was also wearing the paddle. And I had to put an end to that I think.

Jack McBrayer: Oh no.

Robert Carlock: I think it's called paddly-marbly so there's a lot of... There's a lot of creativity in the writer's room as you can tell.

Jack McBrayer: A lot of law suits now too.

Robert Carlock: Yeah. So stuff like that does boil up sometimes but hopefully usually there's just too much work to do for people to actually be enjoying themselves.