Community Cast Jim Rash As The Dean At The Last Possible Moment

It's honestly hard to imagine "Community" without Jim Rash. The Academy Award-winning screenwriter played Dean Craig Pelton, the "pansexual imp" and man of many costumes in charge of Greendale Community College. He's an incredible character who brings a lot of ridiculous joy to the series and helped make Greendale into a place where pretty much anything could happen. Who else but the inept yet endearing Dean could have accidentally served a zombie virus as taco meat, or sent everyone into a school-wide frenzy more than once with several ridiculous paintball contests? While he wasn't a part of the study group, the Dean was as vital to "Community" as any of its students, and his presence throughout the series was always a welcome one.

Surprisingly, Rash wasn't always a part of the "Community" cast, and he was added at the very last moment. At a panel during PaleyFest in 2011, director Joe Russo, Rash, and star Joel McHale, who plays Jeff, discussed the beginning of Rash's reign on the series, and apparently he was hired while they were in the process of shooting the pilot. That's about as "last minute" as you can get, but it ended up being one of the most important decisions in the show's creation.

Not only was Jim Rash cast at the last minute, but apparently the dean wasn't even supposed to be in the series beyond the first episode! At PaleyFest, Joe Russo explained that Rash was just too perfect to let go:

"While we were shooting the pilot we cast him. So I think [he] certainly evolved the most because he was really only supposed to be in the pilot and open the episode with a two-minute speech, but he was so funny and the concept was so interesting that he worked his way into the series and has become sort of comedy gold for us."

Rash joked that he just "kept showing up" and that they would "throw him a couple lines" so that he would leave, but I imagine that the folks behind "Community" took one look at Rash's delightful introduction and knew that he should be a series regular. His character ended up progressing over the years as he became friends with the study group, developed a fetish for Dalmatians, and even tried to clean up his act and be a proper dean. (It didn't take) Rash and Joel McHale also gave us one of the best moments in the entire series, when they sang karaoke together because the Dean blackmailed Jeff into hanging out with him, and a world without their rendition of "Kiss From a Rose" is a world I don't want to live in.