New guy on ‘New Girl’ dislikes third wheel role

  • By Ellen Gray Philadelphia Daily News
  • Monday, October 14, 2013 4:58pm
  • LifeGo-See-Do

LaMorne Morris is tired already of the Nick (Jake Johnson) and Jess (Zooey Deschanel) romance on Fox’s “New Girl.”

“I think they should break up. My character (Winston) thinks so, too,” Morris said.

Because it’s uncomfortable living in an apartment where two of the roommates are sleeping with each other?

“It is,” Morris said. “I lived in that scenario before. It was a worse scenario than that. I dated a woman … and she moved to LA and we became roommates. It was three women and myself.”

So, he was Jess? (“New Girl,” now in its third season, stars Deschanel as a woman who shares a loft apartment with three men.)

“I was Jess. I really was,” said the Chicago-born actor and Second City alum. “And I started to date the woman again, and we dated for like a couple of months. And then just because we lived together, it didn’t work out. She did start dating someone else eventually, and that was very uncomfortable.”

But while Morris may not like seeing Winston becoming the odd man out in the loft, he doesn’t mind at all that his character’s becoming odder by the week.

Having joined the show after the pilot, when Damon Wayans Jr., who’d been cast as a different character, had to return to ABC’s “Happy Endings,” Morris found himself playing a character who wasn’t quite as well-defined as the others.

Wayans, whose show was recently canceled, will be doing a multi-episode arc on “New Girl” this season.

Initially, Winston “was kind of the voice of reason … the one who was the voice of the audience,” Morris said. “There’s so much chaos going on in the loft: Schmidt’s (Max Greenfield) being a (jerk), Jess is being too quirky and Nick is always pissed off. He (Winston) was the one who was kind of standing back, going, ‘What are you guys doing?’”

But as the show’s gone on, Winston’s been found to have “his own weirdness,” he said. (Case in point: last week’s cat-brothel episode.)

“He doesn’t have a sweet spot. There’s no calm with Winston; there’s an extreme high or an extreme low. He’s really competitive or he doesn’t care about it at all.”

Morris, meanwhile, has become obsessed with Vine, the six-second video app.

“I spent my whole summer making Vine videos,” he said, posting them on Vine as lamornemorris. “It’s such a short format, initially, it seems ridiculous. But you get addicted to it.”

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