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Former Conyers resident and "30 Rock" star Jack McBrayer admits he didn't do all that much during the writers' strike, which dragged from November through February.

"For the most part, I sat around," he said recently by phone from his apartment in New York City. "I'm not a big fan of winter. I got into a funk for a while. I'm just glad to have a reason to get up in the morning!" (That Southern drawl he has playing naive Kenneth the Page on the sitcom is very real.)

Mitchell Haaseth/NBC (ENLARGE)
Jack McBrayer spent 30 days shooting 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' in Hawaii but only had to work eight of those.
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The NBC sitcom, which also stars Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan and Alec Baldwin, returns Thursday night with its first new episode in three months.

McBrayer did take a longer Christmas break in Georgia than normal, he said. His siblings and parents still live in the area.

Has fame changed his family's attitude toward him? "Not a whole lot different," he said. "I still get yelled at for not clearing my plate when I'm done."

He did get to do one cool thing in February: Mariah Carey asked him to play a computer nerd in the video for her current single "Touch My Body." They play frisbee, shoot toy guns and frolic in bed together.

"It was so surreal," he said. "There was nothing relatable about it at all for me to grasp on to. When I got the phone call, I thought it was a joke."

McBrayer was shocked that Carey was such a comedy buff: "She was quoting lines from Judd Apatow movies and '30 Rock'!"

But he did have a scary moment. He threw a frisbee that smacked Carey in the face. "Twenty people ran over and started powdering her," he said. "I apologized profusely. Her bodyguard the size of a minivan said, 'You gotta be careful with the frisbee.'"

Although "30 Rock" pulls in modest ratings (6.6 million, ranked 104th season to date), the show's demographics are among the most upscale on TV. As a result, NBC renewed the sitcom for a third season earlier this month.

"That anxiety we had last year has dissipated," McBrayer said. "Winning that Emmy was a big coup. And though our ratings aren't stellar, they're growing."

The scripts for the season's five post-strike shows "have been super fun," he said.

Thursday, Liz Lemon (Fey's character) threatens Kenneth if he reveals a secret she was keeping. Next Thursday, veteran actor Tim Conway ("The Carol Burnett Show") plays a '50s era actor who Kenneth worships.

"He was fantastic, a gem!" he said. "His character, Bucky Bright, gives me a tour of the studios and tells me all these things that horrify me." For instance, Conway's character describes "sandwich girls," who were the precursors to the NBC pages. And no, the girls didn't serve sandwiches per se.

McBrayer, who made a notable appearance in 2006 in "Talladega Nights," is also on the silver screen in the comedy "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," out April 18.

"It's a small part," he said. "I play a newlywed bemoaning our marital problems." The best part: he got to spend 30 days last year in Hawaii and only had to work eight of those days. "I had a 22-day Hawaiian vacation! It was awesome!"