I promise I’m not trying to insult Jason Mantzoukas when I tell him he has “Big Dirtbag Energy” on a dreary Tuesday afternoon in lower Manhattan. I realize how weird it sounds, but stick with me: If you’re familiar with any of his performances—Rafi on The League, Dennis Feinstein on Parks and Rec, Adrian Pimento on Brooklyn Nine-Nine—you’ll notice a trend. These are brash, chaotic men who have no problem saying the grossest, most shocking things at the very moment they shouldn’t. Mantzoukas’s wide, excited eyes and wiry beard only add to the illusion. It's exactly what we’ve all come to love about him.

Mantzoukas is comfortable in a crowd, feeding off improvisational energy. But this fall he’s trying his hand at being in the spotlight in The Long Dumb Road, a story of a student (Nat) driving to Los Angeles to begin art school. He's joined by a weird hitchhiker, Richard, whom he picks up on his road trip through the southwest. You can probably guess which of the two Mantzoukas plays if you know his work at all. And while he delivers all the delightful mania you'd expect, there’s sadness in his portrayal, too. We all know a Richard, a man who was the life of the party until life moved on from him, who's convinced he’s in love with a girl after a one-night stand and can’t comprehend a boundary. Richard doesn’t want to admit the kind of masculinity he’s been embracing his whole life has given him nothing but loneliness.

Mantzoukas knows he is not his characters, but there’s a reason he keeps playing guys like this. Who wouldn’t want free rein to be this sort of jerk with no consequences? He assures me, though, that no one is in danger around him. He's here to be a team player. It's that sense of camaraderie and teamwork that drew him to comedy in the first place. And even if he keeps starring in films, he’ll never stop saying “yes, and...”

GQ: You've clearly been doing a lot of great comedy for a very long time. Does it feel like you're hitting some different area of success right now?

Jason Mantzoukas: Yeah, I guess so. This movie, The Long Dumb Road, is the first time I'm one of the leads, so certainly that is different.

Have people shouted your Good Place character's name "Derek!" at you yet?

People don't, which is fine. The thing people shout at me is "Rafi!"—the character from The League. People shout that at me quite a bit. The people that are fans of Derek are much more polite.

The Good Place fans are really nice. Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans are also. Brooklyn Nine-Nine gets a huge amount of young fans. This is the first time that I'll be in the supermarket and a 12-year-old kid'll be like, "Adrian Pimento?!" with his mom, shopping, freaking out. That's cool. That's different because kids never watch the stuff that I've done otherwise. As they shouldn't.

My teenage cousins are all obsessed with Big Mouth.

It’s so good. When we were doing the first season, I remember thinking, "Oh, this is so funny. This is so great." And then really cumulatively being like, "Oh no, this is actually really, incredibly compassionate and heartfelt and sweet and really not just treating all this stuff for jokes. This is responsible television."

With Jay and a ton of other characters you play, I realized there’s some overlap. My friends and I came up with a phrase that we believe you emanate: "Big Dirtbag Energy."

Okay. All right...