Several new interviews from the Winter TCAs showed up in recent days. The first one is from Examiner:
Fred Willard guest stars in “Mrs. Smartypants” as a high school teacher with a history with the Chance family who comes back into their lives when Jimmy decides to go back to school and earn his GED. And his parents end up following him into the classroom.
“None of us want to be the dumbest person in the house, so it’s ‘if you’re going to go, then we will to’!” Garret Dillahunt previewed for us when we caught up with him in Los Angeles last week.
Though we had personally assumed Burt and Virginia (Martha Plimpton) had actually graduated, Dillahunt shrugged and said “apparently not.” Well, they did have their hands full with a new baby and all! And the cycle was repeated for Jimmy (Lucas Neff), who decides to better himself when he sees indication of above-average intelligence in his daughter, Hope (Baylie and Rylie Cregut). — More at Examiner
And these two are from FOX All Access and TV Watchtower:
All right, it’s probably not the most recent interview ever, but it’s fun and it’s just been added to Raising-Hope.us. Head over there for interviews with the rest of the cast.
E! Online talked to Garret, Lucas Neff and Shannon Woodward about tonight’s episode, “It’s a Hopeful Life.” The clip is embedded below (can’t turn off autoplay, sorry), along with a couple of sneak peeks, and here is the synopsis:
In a nod to the holiday classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Chances go to the movies and are surprised when they discover that the film they’re watching is strikingly similar to their own family life. Meanwhile, Jimmy is transported into a cinematic dreamlike state and experiences the world as though he never met Hope’s serial killer mom Lucy (guest star Bijou Phillips). But when he returns to reality, he soon realizes that life without Hope would not be nearly as sweet.
L.A. Times has an article on actors who have been successful in making the move from drama to comedy (or the other way around) in recent years. They talked to Garret among other people.
Snippets:
Actor Garret Dillahunt is solemn as he reflects on his acting career, picking at the knee of his jeans as he composes his thoughts on his road from “Deadwood,” where he played a throat-slashing geologist who preyed on prostitutes to his turn as the boorish patriarch on the Fox comedy “Raising Hope.” And yet his seriousness is offset by the fact that, minutes earlier, he goofily strolled into the dressing room on the Chatsworth set of “Raising Hope”–for the interview–on a scooter.
It’s the sort of light-switch shift that has worked in the 46-year-old actor’s advantage in moving from comedy to drama and back again.
“It’s just what I wanted to do,” Dillahunt said. “A good thing about doing this for a while is that it becomes your thing–you get a reputation for being versatile. I like the thought that people might think of me for a wide roster of roles. Even if it’s a mistake, I like having the shot.” – L.A. Times Blogs
For some actors, such as Garret Dillahunt, the boorish patriarch on Fox’s “Raising Hope,” the move from drama to comedy was strategic. Before his sitcom, Dillahunt earned a name for playing bad guys including a blood-chilling part in HBO’s critically acclaimed “Deadwood” as an erudite and throat-slashing geologist who preyed on prostitutes.
“People constantly want to put you in a box,” he said on the set of the Fox sitcom. “You play psychopaths on ‘Deadwood’ for a while and people are like, ‘You can’t do comedy, you’re the drama guy.’ And you know, some people like doing the same thing — and maybe it makes them easier to market. But for me, what keeps me interested and awake is change in this business. It’s what I thought we are supposed to do as actors.” (…)
“We’re kind of gamblers, in a way,” Dillahunt said. “It can be a colossal failure when we try something new. But actors hate being told they can’t do something. It’s all about the risk.” – L.A. Times
Several new interviews from the Winter TCAs showed up in recent days. The first one is from Examiner: 
