KEY POINTS:
The trouble with playing a lovable dimwit in a TV show is the likelihood of being typecast.
It's something actor Ethan Suplee is increasingly conscious of, because as Randy, the younger brother of Earl in the comedy My Name Is Earl, he plays the biggest dimwit on television.
"I have noticed a lot more since Earl that people have wanted me to play a dumb southern guy," says Suplee in his soft, slow drawl. "I don't even think that is Randy, but there is that thing that I don't want to play dimwitted too much because people won't know me as anything else."
Although one of his first major roles was also as an idiot, in 1995 movie Mallrats, alongside Earl co-star Jason Lee, he's gone on to play diverse roles, including a skinhead in gritty 1998 movie American History X and a goth in The Butterfly Effect.
But the steady TV role of Randy suits him fine now because he has a young family to look after. And besides, while Randy is thick in the extreme - he can't cross the road without help and he's far more dim than our own Pascal from Outrageous Fortune - he holds a special place in Suplee's heart because, well, he's a genuinely nice guy.
"He would never harm anybody or do anything mean-spirited, and I hope that I am a nice guy like that, too."
The third series of the show picks up with Earl in prison, doing time that his ex-wife, Joy, is meant to be serving.
So for Randy it's a brave new world facing day-to-day life without Earl - and Joy and her new husband, Darnell, are left to look after him. In a surprise twist we see the usually venomous and selfish Joy's sensitive side as she takes the bumbling Randy under her wing.
Suplee was drawn to the role because the script about a guy who's going around righting his wrongs was a great idea during a time when he says there wasn't much good TV being made.
Also, he could work with Lee again, with whom he has been friends for years.
"My best friend went out with this girl whose sister and Jason lived together," is how he describes the hook-up when he was 15 and Lee was 20.
"Jason had a car before we did. He could buy beer before we could, and it was just one of those things."
As for what else happens in the new season, Suplee isn't saying much.
LOWDOWN
What: My Name Is Earl
Who: Ethan Suplee, who plays Earl's dimwitted bro, Randy
Where & when: Sundays, 8pm, TV3
