Teenage Jake Johnson had little reason to think that an afternoon scramble up the side of a building would end with his arrest. But he was fresh off a sophomore year where he just decided to stop going to school—like, for the entire year—and if he didn’t get in trouble for that, what was a little urban mountaineering? Plus, it was sort of his thing. He loved climbing roofs as a kid in Chicago. It was an ideal spot to hang with a friend and chat. Or smoke a cigarette. (“But don’t put that in,” the seemingly always harmless Johnson says over the phone, “in case younger people read it.”)

Unfortunately, during this particular rooftop hang, Jake and a classmate were mistaken for burglars. In Johnson's memory, squad cars arrived, guns were pulled, and two bored high schoolers were taken to the station. The cops, not yet convinced they weren’t trying to break in, pressed Johnson—who had been put in a separate room from his friend—on what he was doing up there. He swallowed, and then told them the truth.

“Well,” he said, “we were talking about if the world was flat, and if you could see everybody from other nations, if it would cause less wars, if we could actually connect more.”

John says his buddy, in his room, said the same thing.

“The cops were like, ‘These guys aren’t breaking in,’” Johnson remembers now, laughing. “’They’re just losers.’”

Onscreen, the 40-year-old Johnson has made a career of playing dudes who, if not losers, would definitely try to scale a building just to bullshit at the summit. I stumbled into his world—or he stumbled into mine—one day while desperately scouring Netflix in the throes of a particularly tremendous hangover. I found a salve in (thirteen straight episodes of) New Girl, in no small part because of Johnson’s Nick Miller. Watching him play the ensemble’s slouchy, somewhat self-loathing law school dropout turned bartender was like sliding under a gravity blanket warmed to the temperature of a freshly-baked croissant. There was something inherently trustworthy and comforting in Johnson’s regular-guy not-quite-machismo, the type of familiar face you want around when you’re alone, on your couch, wondering if you might die of the shakes.

In the seven years since his breakout on New Girl, Johnson has maintained a healthy diet of movie roles: co-starring in Let’s Be Cops, headlining a trio of indies (Drinking Buddies, Digging for Fire, and Win It All), and landing parts in blockbusters like The Mummy and Jurassic World. Each time he popped up, it was a welcome surprise, like seeing the regular from your local bar onscreen: “Hey, that guy! He and I talked about baseball once.” And since almost all of those gigs shared a similar Nick Miller-ish tilt—a funny and handsome (but not threateningly so) dude who’s sometimes down on his luck but never far from a cold beer—it was hard to divorce the character from the guy. Was Johnson acting, or just kind of hanging out, on camera, again? It’s all enough to make you feel like you know Jake Johnson, even though you probably don’t.

“I've got a theory with each character I play,” he says. “Regardless of the actions that they do, I, as Jake, have to like these people. And I have to say, ‘I wouldn't mind hanging out with this guy for an hour and a half.’ Because if I don't wanna hang out with him, then why would an audience member wanna hang out with him?”