"Anybody who has ever worked with Greg [Garcia], all he has to do is call them up and they say yes before they even hear what he needs, because he's one of the greatest men in this business," Jaime Pressly told ET over the phone on Tuesday -- and she really meant it.
The actress reunites with the My Name Is Earl creator on Thursday's episode of his new TBS anthology series, The Guest Book, where she plays a character that she describes as "a little bit" of her Earl character, Joy Turner.
"This girl that I play [on The Guest Book] is trying so hard to forget her past and start over and be this new and improved version of herself and have a real relationship for once, and she really doesn't know how to do that. I think everybody understands that, what it's like to try to... 'I'm not going to do what I did in the last relationship in this one, I'm going to try to be better.' We've all been there," Pressly said, teasing that her character, Christy, eats a lot of "magical brownies" in an effort to prevent her boyfriend's daughter from having any.
"She didn't have a choice," she said with a laugh. "Tune in tomorrow night and see what happens when I eat magical brownies!"
While Pressly joked that she found Christy's dilemma "totally unrelatable," the character was written by Garcia just for her.
"That's what he told me!" she boasted. "He sent me an email and said he wanted to send me a script. [Then] he called me up and and told me about the gist of the actual show in general, about the series, and then said he had written [an episode] for me."
"You can't help but be loyal to him," the 40-year-old actress added. "There wasn't any way I wasn't going to make it work, as far as scheduling goes, because I'm shooing my show, Mom, but he worked around my schedule so that we could shoot it on one of my weeks off, and it was my pleasure."
Garcia has been working with Pressly, as well as many other Earl stars, off and on since the critically acclaimed NBC show aired its series finale in 2008, and the actress credits their continued working relationship to their great "synergy."
"There's a synergy that you never lose when you get somebody great, and you have a great chemistry with someone that you work with. It's just like in any kind of relationship, when you really trust and respect each other, you don't doubt that for a second what they're telling you to do or asking you to do," she shared. "With Earl, he just let me kind of do my thing. He and the writers wrote us the most incredible dialogue ever, but he let me kind of fly by the seat of my pants, and go as far out as I wanted to, and let me do my thing, because he trusted me and respected me as an actor, and when somebody treats you that way, and gives you that kind of respect, it makes you better, no matter what it is. [It's] the same thing in any relationship. It makes you better."
If Pressly's comments sound like she's hoping to work with Garcia again, it's because she is -- and said the Emmy-winning TV creator and writer could get the My Name Is Earl cast back together for a revival in a heartbeat.
"I don't know anybody who was a part of that show that wouldn't go back and do it again. It would all be up to Greg Garcia, and if he made the call... Hell, he wouldn't have to call, all he has to do is send out a mass email to all of us and we'd all be like, 'Yup, I'm in,'" she insisted. "That would be it, because it was one of the greatest experiences of anybody's life that was a part of that show, and I don't know anybody who would say no to that man."
"To go back to that show, to such an incredible cast, and crew and writers and boss, like I said, it's one of those things that, who wouldn't want to relive that?" she asked.
The Guest Book airs Thursdays at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on TBS.
