Trevor Moore, 31, is a do-it-yourself kind of guy. As a founding member of the Whitest Kids U' Know comedy troupe (which is entering the fifth season of its eponymous television show on the Independent Film Channel), the Louisa County native has written, acted in and directed scores of humorous sketches, as well as co-written and starred in Miss March , a feature film. Moore has played Hitler and John Wilkes Booth, but his favorite characters are bosses and rednecks. This month, his new comedy, Breaking In , premieres on Fox.
Q: Can you give me a synopsis of your new show on Fox?
A: It's about an info-security firm, people who test companies for how secure their information is and how easy it is to break in, stuff like that. I play a guy who's sort of a master disguiser, so I'll try to dress up as different things and infiltrate companies.
Q: Is it exciting to be part of a show that's anticipated?
A: Yeah, it's going to be on after American Idol .
Q: Hey, that's good!
A: Couldn't pick a better time slot.
Q: What's your favorite character to play on The Whitest Kids U' Know ?
A: I always like playing the business guys, like old, detached businessmen. I always wind up playing this very deep-voiced boss that's obsessed with business and oblivious to everything else. It's based on my impression of business in general. I also like playing rednecks a lot.
Q: Do you feel like you met rednecks when you were growing up?
A: There's a lot of good ol' boy kind of people, but I think there's something cool about that. Living in New York the past 10 years and now living in Los Angeles, I guess I look back kind of romantically on that.
Q: You went to VCU for a while. What did you do there?
A: I went to VCU for a year, and I'd do standup here and there, but I'd done a public-access show in Charlottesville. During my time at VCU, a guy who owned a whole bunch of television stations in the Southeast, named John Kyle, was starting a new station in Charlottesville, and he wanted some original programming. So he contacted me [in 1998] about buying my old public-access show and producing new episodes of it. He was offering me enough money so I could make a living just doing comedy. So I said, I'm gonna take a year off. I dropped out of VCU, did the show for a year, and after that, I went up to New York to finish college [at the School of Visual Arts]. I became a film major.
Q: You've always pushed the envelope as far as comedy is concerned. Do you ever look back and say, "Oh, I shouldn't have done that"?
A: Absolutely! We always try to be right on the line of offensive and good taste. We try to make it close to the line but not over, but of course, if that's what you're doing all the time, you're going to occasionally miss the mark. So sometimes I'll look back and say, "That's a little bit too much," but eh, what are you going to do? At the end of the day, it's just jokes.
Q: Do you have any plans to write another movie?
A: There has been some talk about pitching around a miniseries, to do six episodes or eight episodes. If I had an idea that I wanted to do as a movie, I definitely would write another one, but right now, I'm working on TV-show ideas.
Q: If you were going to do a miniseries for, let's say, PBS, how would you do that?
A: That would be easy. I would make it all about history, because that's my favorite thing anyway. Most of the Whitest Kids stuff is about history. Actually, the latest movie is all about the Civil War.
We shot with all of these re-enactors. A lot of people were saying there's going to be a lot less Civil War re-enactors after this year. A lot of the Civil War re-enactors are getting up there in age and are just sticking with it to get to the Gettysburg 150th anniversary re-enactment.
Q: What if the miniseries were for Lifetime?
A: I guess it would be all about women who were scorned and killed their husbands. That's all that channel is now.
I was watching it a couple of weeks ago — I think it was Lifetime — and they had a marathon of women who murdered their husbands.
Q: There's a lot of violence on Lifetime. It's either scorned women or maniac husbands.
A: It's a whole channel about not getting married. [ Laughs .]
