Joel McHale: Chevy Chase isn’t ‘allowed’ to join ‘Community’ movie
They’re not very communal behind the scenes.
Joel McHale has confirmed if Chevy Chase will be in the “Community” movie.
While talking to The Post about his Fox sitcom, “Animal Control,” McHale said about Chase potentially returning for the “Community” movie, “I don’t think he’s allowed to. I don’t think it would happen. I’m guessing if you asked him, he wouldn’t be interested.”
He added: “Obviously his unceremonious departure in Season 4 pretty much did that in.”
McHale, 52, co-starred with Chevy Chase, 80, on “Community,” which ran on NBC for six seasons, from 2009 to 2014. The show followed a mismatched group of people at a community college.
Along with McHale and Chase, it starred Donald Glover (“Atlanta”), Alison Brie (“GLOW”), Ken Jeong (“The Hangover”), Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown and Jim Rash.
McHale also opened up about getting physical when clashing with Chase, during a recent episode of Michael Rosenbaum’s “Inside of You” podcast.
“It would get a little contentious … I got in trouble one time because I injured him. I dislocated his shoulder,” said McHale.
During a 2023 interview on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, Chase said that he didn’t think “Community” was “funny enough.”
“I felt a little bit constrained a bit. Everyone had their bits and stuff. I thought they were all good, but it just wasn’t hard-hitting enough for me,” the former “Saturday Night Live” star said.
“My response to that was, ‘Well, yeah the feeling is mutual about your attitude, and you didn’t have to be there,’” McHale said on the “Inside of You” podcast.
“He’s like, ‘I didn’t want to be around the table with those people.’ And like Gillian would say, ‘[The] feeling’s mutual.’ This was not a prison sentence. We were not conscripted into a war,” said McHale.
“You were being paid a lot of money and getting free food all day long, so you could just walk away.”
Chase starred in four seasons of “Community,” before being fired from the show in 2013 after allegedly using a racist slur toward Glover during filming. This also followed a heated confrontation with the show’s creator, Dan Harmon.
Glover, 40, also known as Childish Gambino, claimed that Chase used the N-word while on a rant about his issues with his character.
In a 2018 piece for the New Yorker, Harmon wrote, “Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off.”
“I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-PC verbiage, and Donald said, ‘I don’t even worry about it.’”
During an interview with the Washington Post later that same year, Chase didn’t deny using the slur.
“I could have said it,” Chase told the outlet, before noting it would have been misinterpreted. He then added that he had been a fan of Glover’s the entire time they worked together on “Community” and denied that he was a bigot.
“I don’t think [him returning] is a thing,” McHale told The Post, talking about the upcoming “Community” movie.
McHale also explained that the movie hasn’t filmed yet.
“I know that we’ve been saying stuff about it. But we have a budget. We are going to do it — it’s just getting the date and lining everybody up. It’s going to happen. I was 50/50, less than 50/50 [about the chances of it happening] a couple years ago. But now, it’s real. So we just have to get the dates down.”
The Post has reached out to Chase for comment.
