By Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith
Oct 13, 2008
With a worldwide box-office gross of $360 million, Fox's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" landed among the top 10 money-earning movies of last year. So it's not surprising that there's talk of a sequel. Don't expect Jason Lee to be involved, though. "I don't know if I'm going to do that. I think I'm going to leave the first one alone," says the "My Name is Earl" star, who played the Chipmunks' de facto dad, Dave Seville, in the live-action version of the vintage cartoon.
No More Chipmunks for Jason Lee (Image: Wenn)
"I definitely want to do more film work, but the kind of thing I haven't done in a while -- or something I haven't done yet. I want to do something very character-driven. I loved working with Cameron Crowe on 'Almost Famous' and 'Vanilla Sky, and Lawrence Kasdan on 'Mumford.'"
Lee notes that he was on track to do a feature of that ilk last summer, "which would have been awesome," but his plans were thrown a curve by the writers' strike. So was the "My Name is Earl" schedule, which contributed to the show winding up with some offbeat episodes -- even by "Earl" standards -- in which Earl was in a coma.
Now, "It's good because we're back to the list this season," notes Jason of Earl's famous karma list of wrongs for which he needs to atone. "Not that we ever really left the list, but there were a lot of really different things going on -- Earl going to prison, 'Bad Earl' quitting the list, Earl in a coma. All that stuff was a lot of fun. We started it because, at the end of season one, we started thinking, 'Are we giving enough to the audience to invest in?' With a show like 'Dexter,' for example -- which is my favorite show -- you have to watch every single episode, or you miss something. So we thought of doing it in a more serialized way. But now we've come full circle doing something new every week so fans never know what to expect."
MEANWHILE: With guest stars including Seth Green and David Arquette, "Earl" creator Greg Garcia believes, "We're doing episodes that are better than we've ever done. I just wish more people were watching it. It seems like everything in TV is down a little bit," he observes. "Earl" started its new season a couple weeks ahead of its companion show in the 8 p.m. hour, NBC's new "Kath & Kim." "In one way it shows respect for us, that they started the season double pumping with 'Earls' -- but in another way, well, you want to be on when people are watching," Garcia says. "But I'm not complaining about it. This is just the nature of the business."
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