Not-so-alter ego of Kenneth the Page

When Jack McBrayer began pursuing an acting career, the first quality that agents and casting directors noticed was not his quick wit, his excitable nature or his youthful countenance, which seems not to have aged a day since he left Conyers, Ga., to attend college. It was his accent, a Southern-fried drawl that would curl the toes of Tennessee Williams. That was never a good thing, writes Dave Itzkoff.

“The first words out of their mouths would be, ‘Can you lose the accent?’ ” Mr. McBrayer, 34, recalled in a recent interview. “And, unfortunately, I can, but it sounds like I’m making fun of people.” Yet as Mr. McBrayer honed his skills in the improvisational comedy theaters of Chicago, he realized there was no reason his inflection should impede his career. “We could be anyone and say anything,” he said, and he became more comfortable playing other characters or “just playing a heightened version of myself.”

And what would a heightened version of Mr. McBrayer look like? “Well,” he said, “it’s pretty much Kenneth the Page. ”

Kenneth the Page is, of course, Mr. McBrayer’s character on 30 Rock, a wide-eyed, blazer-clad naïf who works the most thankless of thankless jobs at the sitcom’s fictional incarnation of NBC yet remains in rapt awe of colleagues like the self-important executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) and the harried producer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). In that sense Mr. McBrayer really isn’t too different from his inexperienced alter ego. “People in television can get a little jaded a little quickly,” he said. “Fortunately, I have done so little of it that I have not had the opportunity to grow weary of it.”

Though he grew up a fan of subversive children’s television shows like The Electric Company and classic sketch programs like The Carol Burnett Show, Mr. McBrayer did not consider comedy his calling until after he had graduated from the University of Evansville in Indiana. In the summer of 1995 he moved to Chicago during a blistering heat wave and took refuge in the Second City comedy theatre simply because it had air-conditioning. There he found himself entranced by the performances of troupe members like Ms. Fey, Rachel Dratch (the future Saturday Night Live star) and Adam McKay (the future director of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby), and he quickly joined the group himself.

After leaving Second City in 2002, Mr. McBrayer appeared in small roles on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Arrested Development and in Talladega Nights. But he also worked in numerous menial jobs that would provide unexpected preparation for the role of Kenneth, which Ms. Fey, creator and producer of 30 Rock, conceived specifically for him.

Mr. McBrayer has worked in a colorful array of places: a factory that made swimming-pool liners; an Applebee’s restaurant, where he was named employee of the month; an office where his job required him to reorganize a huge storage closet. “If I was hung over,” he said, “I would stack boxes just so I could curl up in a fetal position for 15 minutes. Money well earned.”

As a star of 30 Rock (whose new episodes resume on Thursday) he has somewhat brighter career prospects. He recently appeared with the pop singer Mariah Carey in her video for “Touch My Body” playing a nebbishy computer repairman who arrives at Ms. Carey’s mansion. Shot in a single day and directed by the filmmaker Brett Ratner, the video was a surreal experience for Mr. McBrayer.

“To hear Brett Ratner say, ‘O.K., now walk more slowly with the unicorn’; ‘O.K., Mariah, spank Jack more,’ ” he said. “What is happening to my life?” The fantasy was nearly derailed, however, when an errant Frisbee tossed by Mr. McBrayer hit Ms. Carey in the face. “Her bodyguard came and explained to me that I should probably be more careful,” he said. “And we never saw that Frisbee again.”

He can be seen beginning April 18 in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, playing a newly-wed who finds connubial bliss as awkward as Mr. McBrayer felt shooting his character’s sex scenes. “For me I had to wear these little nudie pants, and they are not flattering on nobody,” he said. “I looked smooth like a little Ken doll.”

As he continues to build his résumé, Mr. McBrayer doubts he’ll ever be able to shake the sense of wonder he feels working with 30 Rock co-stars like Mr. Baldwin. “The hardest acting for me was not to freak out and say, ‘Oh my God, I loved you in Prelude to a Kiss!’ ” he said. “But ask me again in five years. ‘Ugh, I’ve got to do a scene with Alec again? Boring!’