Earl's Crab Man, Eddie Steeples, Serves Up Answers

You wouldn't know it from his laid-back on-screen persona, but Eddie Steeples is a very busy guy. In order to interview My Name Is Earl's Darnell (aka Crab Man), we had to e-mail him our questions, which he in turn responded to from the set of the independent film When Is Tomorrow, which he cowrote and coproduced. Like his Earl character, who's in the witness-protection program for undisclosed reasons, we get the feeling there's much more than meets the eye to the guy most of us first knew as Offic Max's groovy Rubberband Man. While we weren't about to get Steeples to reveal his own deep dark secrets via e-mail, he did give us insight into the mysterious Crab Man.

TVGuide.com: Darnell is such a great, enigmatic character, so we always want to see more of him. But do you think it's better that he only appears on the show in small doses?
Eddie Steeples: It's one of those "the less you see, the more you want" type of things. That's what keeps the enigma alive.

TVGuide.com: When you first started on the show, did you have to make up your own backstory, or did the writers fill you in?
Steeples: In the beginning, I had my own Darnell backstory in my head, but as the scripts kept coming out, revealing Darnell's past through flashbacks, I soon let that go. It's easier to adjust, otherwise you become attached to what you have no control of. Especially in television.