Celebrity Scoop: Fred Willard

No one plays clueless better than Fred Willard.

"I would like to be clueless," he says. "I am too clueful. I worry about a lot of things."

Yet he's surprised that people often laugh when he's being serious. Willard, as a wide-ranging interview proves, is a genuinely nice man.

"I don't like to play unpleasant guys if there is no redeeming value," he says.

He has more than 300 TV and movie credits, including from one of the season's biggest hits, "Modern Family," playing Frank, Phil's dad. He figures he's returning.

"They asked me for a photo of myself to hang," Willard says. "As long as my picture is hanging in the hallway, it's a way to get me back in."

Among his favorite gigs is working for Jay Leno. "You go in and do one rehearsal and then sit with Jay and the writers," Willard says. "And he will ask me, 'Fred, is this funny?' That's very flattering to me. And we do it that night, and they say to ad-lib. Then you go home and watch it, and it's over."

Willard often works with the same people, notably Christopher Guest and Martin Mull. Guest was an understudy in a Greenwich Village play in which Willard had a role.

"I barely remembered him, and when it came time to cast 'Waiting for Guffman,' he wanted to talk to me," he says. Guest's improvising intrigued Willard.

Having seen Mull perform at a club, Willard was a fan but had his doubts about playing the second banana on "Fernwood 2-Night," especially since he was just cast in a sitcom as a spaceship captain.

"By the third day, I was having so much fun I went to the producer and said I would like do this," he says.

He's been busy since.