It’s not the kind of talent feeding frenzy that, say, “Friends” kicked off 15 years ago, but the cast of a new NBC Thursday-night comedy is once again migrating to features en masse.
Gillian Jacobs is the latest cast member from NBC’s half-hour junior-college send-up “Community” to spend her summer hiatus on a movie set. She’s currently in Los Angeles shooting the indie comedy “Let Go,” a project from first-time writer-director-producer Brian Jett that also stars David Denman, Kevin Hart and Ed Asner.
Set to wrap production at the end of June and targeting a debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the film casts Denman – best known as John Krasinksi’s rival during the first three seasons of “The Office” – as a parole officer dealing with midlife crises.
Jacobs, Hart and Asner play parolees under his watch, undergoing their own various circumstances of mirthful human frailty.
Other cast members include “Big Bang Theory” regular Simon Helberg and “SNL” original player Garrett Morris.
As for Jacobs, who plays sultry, perpetually simmering potential love interest Britta on “Community,” she’s only the latest regular from the show to branch out.
Star Joe McHale has a number of projects in development, including Fox comedy “What’s Your Number”; co-star Danny Pudi just joined Joe Lynch indie “Knights of Badassdom; and Donald Glover has been the subject of an unlikely grassroots first-ever African-American “Spider-Man” campaign.
This heat isn’t even factoring in “Community” regular Ken Jeong, who already had a robust feature resume before joining the show last fall. (Jeong has Sony/MGM’s “The Zookeeper” and Paramount’s “Transformers 3” on his upcoming docket.)
As for “Let Go,” just getting the project into production culminates a rather Herculean task for Jett, a former actor with an economics degree from George Mason, who not only wrote the script, but also put together financing and packaged the cast, with help from UTA. Shooting wraps June 29.
