It wasn’t for the profits, that’s for sure. Tucked away off a country road that eventually winds its way toward Scituate, the store feels like the last remaining proof of your childhood summers. You can buy balsa wood airplanes here – the kind with the rubber band-driven propeller that always gives you a wicked snap on the fingers. A rack of penny candy jars takes up one corner, leading one local to call the peppery Vivado, 48, the “neighborhood crack dealer.” There’s coffee and trinkets and T-shirts (including an Office one hanging toward the back), and there are just enough groceries to tide you over in a pinch. Still, the warm vibe of the place emanates from the wax lips and pop guns, the Silly Putty, and the basket of rubber snakes. They sell gimp here. Not “lanyard.” Gimp.

Maybe that’s why the 48-year-old Carell bought the corner grocery. Taking up half of a low-slung 1853 wood-frame building – the other half houses the Post Office – the Marshfield Hills General Store came up for sale in 2008, and locals feared the business might close, eliminating a vital community gathering place. During a visit to Los Angeles, Nancy’s sister, Marshfield resident Tish Vivado, mentioned that the business was available, and in the months that followed, Carell flew out, closed the deal, and installed his sister-in-law as manager.

Steve Carell is back in Marshfield, which is sort of a big deal but probably not as big as you think. The star of broad comedies (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Get Smart), fluky indie films (Little Miss Sunshine, Dan in Real Life), and one beloved TV show (The Office) heads East every year to take his summer leisure in this sleepy South Shore town. He and wife Nancy (Walls) Carell – herself a comedian with a mid-1990s season of Saturday Night Live under her belt – own a house here, to which they bring their children, Annie, 10, and Johnny, 7, for a month or so of non-Left Coast beach time. His 45-year-old wife’s family is from the South Shore, and Carell was raised to the northwest, in Acton. This isn’t exactly where the couple live anymore, but it’s perhaps what comes to mind when they think of “home.”

This is the day for which New Englanders endure their winters. Not the kind of day. The day. It’s June 30th – a Thursday without humidity, the temperature parked in the mid-70s, the heavens a rich and shimmering blue. Puffy white clouds out of a Japanese anime chuckle obligingly in the sky.

In person, Carell is taller and more poised than you’d expect, with a splash of gray at his temples. He’s dressed in crisp, unassuming dad-wear: blue plaid shirt, neatly pressed denims, tan bucks. He’s surprisingly slim, too, the result of a recent diet. Artist and Marshfield Hills native David Brega, a family friend, greets the actor in the general store and asks, “So what are we doing? Are we Jenny Craig-ing?” “No, we’re just eating less and working out more. It’s amazing how that works.”

“One of my jobs was to wrap the fruit in plastic wrap,” Carell explains, “and they had a heat pad that you would essentially sear the bottom to seal it. I burned the hell out of my hand. I also – I remember this so vividly – I poked a hole in a bag of unpopped popcorn, and it was pouring all over. So rather than tell the manager, I took a price gun and put, like, 15 prices over the hole – which my manager found an hour later and peeled off. I was just bad at it.”

Actually, he has to spend the next couple of hours talking to a reporter who’s feeling guilty about encroaching on another man’s downtime. The subject is ostensibly Crazy, Stupid, Love., but the air’s too pure and the sun’s too warming for crass commerce. Let’s just say the star is proud of the movie (it’s his first as a producer), I enjoyed it, and you should probably go see it when it opens July 29. OK? OK. Now let’s move on to more important topics, like the worst teenage summer job Steve Carell ever had. Was it his stint working at the Ramada hotel in Woburn? Alphonse’s Powder Mill restaurant in Maynard?

“It’s such a bad investment,” groans Carell as he surveys the bustling morning scene this perfect end-of-June day. He couldn’t be happier. After seven fruitful but hectic years, he has stepped away from NBC’s The Office, on which he played Dunder Mifflin’s toweringly clueless boss Michael Scott. Less than a week ago, Carell departed the LA set of his current production, a semi-apocalyptic road-movie romance called Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, in which he stars opposite Keira Knightley. True, before July is out, he’ll be in New York, embarking on the press tour for his latest release – Crazy, Stupid, Love. – in which he gets dumped by wife Julianne Moore and receives stud-lifestyle coaching from Ryan Gosling. But right now, here is what he has to do: nothing.

As he was filling out law school applications one night, though, he came to an essay question that stumped him: Why do you want to be a lawyer? “I just didn’t know. I didn’t have a valid answer. I went in to talk to my parents, and they sat me down at the kitchen table and said, ‘Well, what do you like to do? Let’s make a list.’ Theater was always one of the things that I’d enjoyed, and they said, ‘Try it. Give yourself a year or however long and see how it goes.’ ”

“I thought I wanted to be an attorney,” Carell says. “That was the goal. All through college, acting and theater were just a hobby, and I felt that I owed my parents more than that. After all that they’d invested in me, I felt I owed them a real career. And I knew the odds of being a successful actor were infinitesimal.”

A normal, mildly obsessive Massachusetts upbringing, in other words, and its privileges were hard-won. Carell’s parents, Edwin, an electrical engineer, and Harriet, a psychiatric nurse, worked to send their sons to private schools, and Steve traveled each day to Concord, first to the Fenn School, then to Middlesex School. By the time he graduated from Ohio’s Denison University in 1984, he was all set – to become a lawyer.

He was soaking up comedy albums, too: Bill Cosby, George Carlin, the Firesign Theatre, and – a crucial influence – the young Steve Martin. “I think I studied his records without knowing that I was studying them,” Carell says now. “For hours on end I’d listen and put the needle back to the one part where he’s talking about balloon animals, and gonorrhea, and where did that come from? Just listening to how he timed it out, because it made me laugh and I wanted to understand why.”

Being back on the East Coast makes Carell open to the charms of nostalgia, and he talks readily about being young and not yet formed on the outskirts of the western suburbs. His own childhood summer vacations were spent camping with his parents and three older brothers up in the White or Green mountains, sometimes Canada, the whole family piling into a little pop-up trailer at night. As a teenager, Carell grew his hair long, played hockey, did summer stock, and bombed up and down Route 128 in a succession of sturdy, unglamorous Toyotas. Asked about his adolescent tastes in music, he squirms and divulges his darkest secret: Steve Carell was a Jethro Tull fanatic. “It was the first concert I ever went to, at the Boston Garden,” he remembers. “This was the Minstrel in the Gallery era. The codpiece! And the tights!” He shakes his head in mortification. “That was also the first date I ever went on. I was a sophomore in high school, and I took a girl to see Jethro Tull.” He laughs with remembered chagrin. “She wasn’t a fan . . .”

He got a job delivering mail in Littleton for around six months while he saved up for a move to Chicago, where, after waiting tables for three years, he joined the touring company of the fabled Second City comedy troupe. There he met his future wife, as well as a colleague named Stephen Colbert, and embarked on a journey that would take him through countless failed TV series, a foothold on The Daily Show in 1999, and, in 2005, the double-whammy breakthrough with The Office on TV and The 40-Year-Old Virgin in theaters.

Think about that: How many parents urge their children to become actors? “It was a great lesson to learn and something I hope I can pass on to my kids,” Carell says. “I’ll never forget, they said: ‘It’s your life, it’s not ours. It’s about doing something that you enjoy and that fulfills you.’ That, I thought, was the best advice ever.”

And if they had told him, Steve, honey, the acting thing is just too risky?

“I’d be the most unhappy attorney you’ve ever met.”

***

Here's the thing you have to realize about Carell: He’s not funny in person. Rather, he doesn’t try to be funny. Unlike a lot of comedians, famous or otherwise, he doesn’t seem to care about being “on.” In fact, right now he’s putting a lot of energy into being off.

Carell realizes this, and he’s a little self-conscious about it. “Is this the driest interview you’ve ever gotten?” he asks. (Not by a long shot.) What he lacks in manic invention, though, he more than makes up for in droll observation. Carell is delightful to spend time with because he finds humor everywhere and in everything, and it constantly cracks him up. When he’s working, he can be funny enough to make your teeth hurt, but when he’s not on the job, things make him laugh rather than the other way around.