Ricky Gervais is well aware that he sometimes annoys people even when he doesn’t mean to. "I think they’ve fallen too much—my fault—for my arrogant persona, my smug award-acceptance speeches, my pseudo-showing off," he suggests. Of course that sort of response is an occupational hazard for anyone who bluffs nasty in modern-day comedy land. But is there something else—something less knee-jerk and more serious—that is beginning to trouble the rest of us about Ricky Gervais?

Some part of it may be the inevitable falloff when your first outpouring is as remarkable and innovative as The Office was: a new kind of show that was mercilessly acute at laying bare the hubris and self-humiliation in everyday life, yet still somehow hilariously and lovingly so. His next sitcom, Extras, may have neared the same heights, but few people said that about the third, Life’s Too Short; and his latest, Derek, was greeted with as much derision as acclaim when it premiered in his British homeland. But it may be more than that. I think there is a sense that someone who seemed like one of us, and on our side, may have slipped his moorings.

Take his three years hosting the Golden Globes. Gervais clearly reveled in a self-appointed role as provocateur of, and truth teller to, the wealthy and overcoddled. "I’m the jester in the court of the kings there," he explains to me. "Who am I meant to have a go at? The homeless? This wasn’t a roomful of wounded soldiers, this was a roomful of the most privileged people in the world who are about to win an award."

Even if his individual jabs, put under scrutiny, were neither quite as searingly truthful and justified nor quite as brave as they laid claim to be (Charlie Sheen likes to party! Robert Downey Jr. knows jail! Unnamed film-star Scientologists are in the closet!), it was indisputably an entertaining turn that livened up the awards season. But it did also heighten a sense that Gervais might now be in the self-congratulation business for real, someone starting to enjoy his own mean streak just a little too much.

Gervais’s public career did not begin to germinate until he was 37, when an unlikely series of events led to the chance to create The Office, his very first attempt at anything like this. If fame comes only in the middle of life, and there have been no desperate compromises made to achieve it, perhaps it sits differently. His achievements since have been remarkable, and Gervais fights his corner and defends the integrity of what he does with verve and passion: He is fierce, funny company, all the time tiptoeing forward and backward along an impossible tightrope, trying to convey how deeply he cares about all he does while doing his very best to suggest he couldn’t care less.

GQ: You’ve often said one reason the character of David Brent worked so well is because he has a blind spot about how people see him.

Ricky Gervais: Yeah. That’s exactly what we’re laughing at.

Do you ever worry that could be true about yourself?

This will sound arrogant: I don’t worry about it at all. I think I’m pretty self-aware. I think I know what I’m doing. You know when you’ve been a prat, you know when you’re being a prat, you know when something sounds pretentious. But you’re right—by definition you don’t know. It’s funny, Christopher Guest said to me—we were talking about comedians we used to like and if people go off the boil—and he was basically saying: "What if we become the people we don’t rate anymore? What if we lose it and we don’t know it?" And I went [grins],"Who cares?"