Few people play swarthy, unsavory characters better than Jason Mantzoukas, who’s made a habit of popping up for supporting turns in beloved comedies like The League, Parks and Recreation, Enlightened, Transparent, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, and Big Mouth. It was only a matter of time before he was given the chance to take center stage.

Enter The Long Dumb Road, an odd-couple buddy comedy in which Mantzoukas and co-star Tony Revolori take an entertaining and emotional road trip. Revolori plays Nat, a 19-year-old driving from Austin, Texas, to art school in Los Angeles when his car breaks down near the garage where Richard (Mantzoukas) works as a mechanic—just as Richard quits his job. Richard and Nat make a deal: he’ll fix Nat’s car if Nat gives him a ride, one that ends up being the road trip of a lifetime.

As The Long Dumb Road prepares to expand wide on November 16, Mantzoukas spoke about stepping up his game for his first starring role, talking his way into John Wick 3, and how friendship has kept his bad-movie podcast, How Did This Get Made?, going for 201 episodes.

Vanity Fair: So, just how long and dumb was the road that led to The Long Dumb Road?

Jason Mantzoukas: Well, Hannah Fidell and Carson Mell had written a script based on a story a friend of theirs told them about being a young kid on a road trip for the first time and picking up a drifter—like, a real, proper drifter. I think the real story was much darker, and the one they started working on was much funnier. But this mismatched pair of guys driving across the Southwest really got them excited to write it. And then I read that script—Tony had already been attached—and I just desperately wanted to be in the movie.

Did you feel any pressure tackling a leading role, given that you’d never done that?

I didn’t feel any pressure, but it was different on a process level. Normally, I kind of get dropped into things—I come in, I upset the balance, and then they get rid of me. I’m not usually responsible for much long-term storytelling, so this one was actually quite different, in that I’m in almost all the scenes, and my character has to have an arc and grow. And we’re shooting out of order, and for the first time I had to be responsible for, like, “Oh, O.K., so the stuff we did this morning was, like, three days after we met, but the stuff we’re doing this afternoon is only three hours after we met.” I really enjoyed that. I liked having more to think about and do than just, like, “What’s the funniest version of this that I can do?”

On that note, did you have the opportunity to improvise at all? Or did you stick pretty hard and fast to the script?

I think Hannah said that it’s probably 70 percent scripted, 30 percent improvised. A lot of the scenes are just Tony and I sitting in a minivan, so we’d do the scripted lines a couple of times, and then without needing to change lighting or camera setup or anything, we were able to be like, “O.K., we can take two more drives up and down this highway.” The Fast & Furious stuff that’s in there, that’s totally improvised. My entire background is in improv. I come out of the Upright Citizens Brigade scene starting in the late 90s. In a lot of those scenes, you’re watching genuine moments of me just improvising stuff and Tony having to deal with it.