Community's Yvette Nicole Brown Breaks Down Sass, Joel McHale, and Weird O.J. Speculation

Yvette Nicole Brown's role as Shirley on Community pairs what the actress describes are her two best attributes: snark and sweetness. Now that the jocular NBC comedy has been picked up for three additional episodes, we'll be able to watch more of Brown adding spicy, sometimes vitriolic zeal to the series' community college setting. Just ahead of tonight's new episode, Brown talks to Movieline about where the show is heading, the most challenging acting on Earth, and that opening credit sequence with the inadvertent O.J. Simpson parallel.

Community has a great ensemble. What do you think Shirley's place is in the show's core?

I think Shirley's kind of the heart of the show in that she's really sentimental and she just adores everybody in the group, even Chevy's character Pierce who hits on her all the time. She just really has a love for everyone, so I think the love that oozes out of her and her excitement for everyone makes everyone a cohesive unit. Because she's got two sides where she's really, really sweet and then also really, really full of rage -- I think that kind of keeps everyone a little nervous around her. The "unstable-ness" of her is where the funny comes in from Shirley.

I also notice that the characters have shifted since the show's start, that we tend to learn about them in spurts. Where has Shirley's evolution taken her, and what else can we expect to learn about her?.

I think Shirley started off just as the mother hen. She had that underbelly of anger and really didn't know why she was so mad. I think the Halloween episode is when it kind of turned, when we started to see that she acts out in rage when she's hurt. Like when her husband asked for the wedding ring back. You got to see more of her. In the coming episodes, we just taped one actually -- we see Shirley's kids and her dynamic with her babies. It's another layer of hers. I'd love to see who Shirley's ex-husband is and see that dynamic. Once we see how she is with the man that she loved who hurt her, we'll have a very clear idea of who Shirley is. I would love if she could meet a teacher at school, or, I don't care, the janitor at the cafeteria who's kind of sweet on her. I'd love to see her romantically. I'm just in love with this writing, and that as an ensemble, we can all carry an episode.

You've done a lot of commercial acting, and I've even heard you defend commercial acting and claim that commercials are what bought your house. Do you miss it at all?

I honestly never worked in just commercial acting, and I'm grateful my career worked out that way. I was doing commercials, TV and movies at the same time. And I probably did defend commercial work; I think there are some actors who turn up their noses at that, like it's a lesser form of acting. I've been on stage, on TV, in movies and commercials, and to me, there's nothing harder than commercial work. You only have 30 seconds to create a character, have an arc, and sell something. It's every type of thing you're going to need as an actor, and you have to do it quickly. When we get to a commercial set, you are hitting the ground running the second you get there. On TV and film sets we laugh, we talk, you know, there's a lot of downtime. There's none of that on a commercial set. You literally get there, and you're running, chasing the day all day. If you can do your best work and end up with a product that makes people laugh or -- you know, some of them are sentimental -- make them feel something, I think you're a great actor. So I do defend them.

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