The ‘Next Day Air’ costar hopes the movie is a ‘ ‘hood classic.’

Donald Faison is not always “on.”

On the eve of the long-delayed release of “Next Day Air,” he’s friendly and forthcoming, but also soft-spoken and cautious to the point of anxiousness. After all, the urban-ensemble-crime-action comedy represents not only a drastic shift in tone from “Scrubs,” the sitcom that made him famous, but it’s also his first outing as a producer. And depending on whom you talk to, “Scrubs” may be nearing the end of its run, so a successful run for “Next Day Air” is that much more important. Oh, and the $2-million movie opens against “Star Trek.”

“I’m a huge ‘Star Wars’ fan but I like ‘Star Trek’ too,” Faison equivocates as he digs into a great-smelling organic steak at a West Hollywood eatery. He can’t help but add, “ ‘Star Wars’ is ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ and ‘Star Trek’ is in the future. But, somehow, the ships in the past all look a lot cooler. And the blasters look better. You’d think in the future. . . . “

In “Next Day Air,” the actor plays a hapless deliveryman whose careless error is the loose pebble that leads to an avalanche of angry drug dealers and wannabe hard guys, played by Wood Harris, Mike Epps and Mos Def. When Faison is onscreen, the piece reads like a slacker comedy; otherwise, it tends to slide into “Jackie Brown” territory.

“I hadn’t done anything like this in a long time -- urban,” the actor says. “I’m the black guy on ‘Scrubs.’ I was the black guy from ‘Clueless.’ Now I’m in an ensemble with a bunch of other African Americans.

“I wish I could sit here and say, ‘The script spoke to me,’ but I guess a lot of it was superficial reasons. Wood came by my house and said he was making this movie and he really wanted me to be in it. I wanted to see how I competed against Mike Epps in scenes. And how I competed against Mos Def. Friendly competition, of course, but could I be funny with those guys around?

“It’s not like I picked up ‘Benjamin Button’ and said, ‘Yes! It’s about time!’ ” he says, laughing. “It was a way to do something completely different from ‘Scrubs.’ ”

Faison admits his job as producer was mainly to play the good cop, doing his best to keep up morale on a fast-and-dirty production.

“We worked really hard on this, and we got it done in, like, 12 days, something like that, 19 days,” he says of shooting in Los Angeles as a stand-in for South Philly while balancing his TV commitment. “I would go back to work in the middle of it. Some days I would have off and I’d just go back to ‘Scrubs.’ ”

His other passion is stop-motion animation. “When I’m not thinking about acting, I’m thinking about stop-motion animation, and is there any way I can make movies like ‘G.I. Joe’ and ‘Transformers’ with my puppets?” he says. “Seth Green is a really good friend of mine and I told him I wanted to work at ‘Robot Chicken,’ and he said, ‘You can come down and intern.’ I enjoyed myself, but I had to stop because you don’t get paid as an intern and it didn’t look like I was going to be more than an intern.

“When you think about it, it’s kind of boring because all I do is sit in a room and move a doll less than an inch every five, 10 minutes. To a lot of people, that seems like a waste of time, but when you meet animators, the imagination that these people have . . . it’s puppetry without the strings.”

And while his film was shot quickly, getting it into theaters was another time drain. The low-budget enterprise had a familiar tortured path to theaters, originating at another studio (which just happens to be putting out “Star Trek”), which intended it for a direct-to-video release last year. The filmmakers shopped it around until Summit Entertainment stepped into the breach.

“I hope I’m not speaking out of turn,” says Faison, “but I’m grateful to Summit; they’re putting it in a lot of theaters. We’ll see what happens.

“It looks a lot bigger than a $2-million movie. The cast is bigger than a $2-million cast. I think we’ve created a ‘hood classic, something that hopefully will do great in the urban community. It would be great to make a stamp in the community like ‘Friday’ made a stamp.

“But I hope the movie’s a success so Paramount can see they should have put it out instead of that ‘Star Trek,’ ” he says with a hearty laugh.

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Where you’ve seen him

Donald Faison started in the Tupac Shakur ‘hood opera “Juice” (1992). He played Murray, Stacey Dash’s character’s boyfriend, in the film and subsequent TV series “Clueless.” Among his Hollywood comedies: “Can’t Hardly Wait” (1998), “Josie and the Pussycats” (2001) and “Uptown Girls” (2003). He was on “Felicity” for two seasons and in films such as “Remember the Titans” (2000) and “Something New” (2006). But he is best known as Dr. Christopher Turk, the best friend of protagonist J. D. (Zach Braff), on ABC’s “Scrubs.” He says among his favorite moments on the show have been his chances to embody Harrison Ford’s great action roles: “The whole scene where Indiana Jones finds the idol in the beginning of ‘Raiders’ -- I got to do that with a tumor.”