Nicholas Braun emerges, socks and sandals first, from a Town Car at the entrance of Coney Island’s Luna Park, game for anything. This includes enthusiastically strapping into a ride that looks like a seesaw designed in hell. This means remaining unfazed when the irate man running the kiddie rides refuses to let him sit in a miniature car because Braun is six feet seven, even though the only apparent risk to the car is that it will seem even tinier than usual.

The sole, fleeting sign that Braun is merely 99 percent psyched to do something comes when he’s on his way to board the Cyclone, the amusement park’s crown jewel, a rickety wooden roller coaster that was built before the Great Depression. “It's just a bunch of plywood,” he quietly observes to himself while gazing up at the bunch of plywood on which he’s about to risk his life.

Then he gets on the Cyclone anyway.

Braun’s low-key, agreeable nature is uncannily reminiscent of Cousin Greg, his endearingly bumbling character on HBO’s sleeper hit Succession. The show, a gloriously scathing portrayal of one-percenters behaving badly, follows media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his four terrible adult children while deftly straddling the line between comedy and drama. Cousin Greg, the mostly guileless grandson of Logan’s estranged brother, conspicuously trips over that line and hurtles directly into the former. When we meet him, he’s just started working at a Roy family theme park, a gig that abruptly ends when he gets too stoned and pukes out of the eyeholes of his mascot costume. But his most memorable moment comes after he finagles his way into a Roy office job and receives his first big paycheck.

Cousin Greg reveals that he intends to take his windfall to California Pizza Kitchen, whose cuisine he talks up with trademark dopey, childlike delight—"They make a Cajun chicken linguine just the way I like it”—only to have his boss and frequent antagonizer Tom Wamsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) brutally mock him for his pedestrian taste. It’s both deeply hilarious and exquisitely heartbreaking, an exchange so visceral that it leaves the viewer wanting to offer Greg a reassuring pat on the back with one hand while stifling laughter with the other.

“I wasn't sure how I was coming across the first season,” Braun, 31, says midway through the Nathan’s hotdog that he’s been intent on procuring since we entered the park. “So many of these scenes, I feel bad and embarrassed. I would leave the scenes feeling like, Oh, God, I fucked that scene up!”

He did not, it turns out, fuck those scenes up. Far from it, actually: Cousin Greg emerged as the runaway fan favorite. As a wide-eyed outsider suddenly plunged into a world of extreme wealth, he serves both as the audience proxy and the show’s beating heart. And though he's demonstrated the potential to be as cunning as his relatives, whether he’ll end up irredeemably corrupt is one of the most anticipated plotlines when Succession returns for its second season this month.

Of course, Braun’s world extends well beyond Cousin Greg and California Pizza Kitchen. (For the record, he’s never tried their Cajun chicken linguine, though he calls their frozen barbecue chicken pizza a “staple.”) He’ll be playing a whole different shade of incompetent in the upcoming Janicza Bravo film Zola, based on the megaviral 2016 tweet thread by a Hooters waitress named Zola, whose two-day trip to go stripping in Florida with a brand new acquaintance named Jessica ended up involving an angry pimp named Z and an armed kidnapping. Braun stars as Dereck, Jessica’s long-suffering dirtbag boyfriend, a role for which he dropped 25 pounds off his already lanky frame in just three weeks. “I was kind of moody,” he admits of his experience crash dieting. “Janicza probably wouldn't have minded, but I just felt like he's a guy whose relationship is eating him up. I thought, I should feel as frail as I can get.” He pulls up a photo of himself in costume as Dereck on his phone, where, all chin strap and saggy jeans, he looks like a man who subsists entirely on Monster Energy drinks and Juul pods.