Carolina Alumni Review - May/June 2012

Thanks to the Groundlings network, Rash grew busier, appearing on several series, including That ’70s Show, Friends and Reno 911! His most high-profile role is on the NBC series Community, now in its third season. Rash plays the strange, befuddled and somewhat creepy Dean Pelton, who often appears in outrageously bizarre drag outfits.

“The show’s writers are all just in love with the idea of
dressing me up, and they ran with it,” Rash says. “There’s
this idea of Dean in their minds as owning a large collection
of dresses, and he pulls out whatever he thinks is appropriate
for that announcement or that moment. But it’s a blast, one
of the best jobs I’ve had since I’ve been out here.”
As his acting career was taking off, Rash struck up a
writing partnership with his fellow Groundling Nat Faxon.
They started out writing sketch parts that they could do
themselves before expanding to screenplays. That landed
them on the radar of writer-director Alexander Payne, who
enlisted them to collaborate on a screenplay version of Kaui
Hart Hemmings’ 2007 novel, The Descendants.

The film version starring Clooney was a big hit, grossing more than $150 million worldwide and earning multiple Oscar nominations. The one Oscar that the movie won was best adapted screenplay, shared by Rash, Faxon and Payne — and leading to Rash’s onstage pose, which instantly turned into a major online phenomenon.

“After the Oscars, my mom and dad have spent a lot of time Googling my name and watching videos, which they keep sending me,” he says. “ ‘Have you seen this?’‘Of course,

everyone has seen that.’A lot of leg stuff, of course. I really
don’t want to milk that. It was just a fun moment of doing
something to show how proud I was. But it’s been great for
my family, a way of reconnecting with people they’ve not
spoken to in years. Me, too, a lot of people I’ve not been in
touch with since college. It’s been a pretty powerful blast
from the past.”
— David Menconi