It’s a dangerous rhetorical proposition to equate a child actor’s current celebrity status and cultural relevancy with the character they played on a decades-old television show. How would that distinctly magazine-profile logic be applied to, say, Miley Cyrus or Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Ron Howard? How tenuous would be the lessons learned? Or worse, what would those lessons say about us?

And yet, in the case of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the comparison not only seems true, but almost inevitable, as though the only way to make sense of him — as an actor, as an intellect, as a sex symbol, as a man — is to consider his 15-year-old self.

My whole life, other people had been rolling the camera, but I wanted to be the one pushing the record button.

That’s when he starred in 3rd Rock From the Sun, the high-concept NBC sitcom about a group of extra-terrestrial explorers come to earth to study our mysterious homo sapien ways. Gordon-Levitt played Tommy, a pervy old man (alien) trapped in the body of a pervy (human) teenager. This is how he was introduced to tens of millions of viewers, as a deeper, ironic thing tucked insidiously inside another seemingly innocent thing.

It goes without saying that Gordon-Levitt nailed the role, because, really, it was the role he was born to play. He was, and is, and has always been somewhat out of time — an old soul in a young man’s body, a star outside his generation, a living, breathing nostalgia trip in and of himself.

Think about the man as he is today. He’s known for his boyish good looks (he’s 34) and easygoing smile, his lackadaisical California coolness, that special unnerving feeling certain celebrities can channel that makes them feel both totally approachable and totally otherworldly — there’s a bit of Rat Pack in him, a bit of guys like Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant or George Clooney.

They’re there in the way he talks, with a deep, ancient voice, and the way he moves, fluid and confident, and the way he understands the intricacies of the profession and its strenuous demands, from performing to the arduous task of sitting at home on a hot Los Angeles afternoon making work calls.

***

What else is there to say about Gordon-Levitt’s childhood? He grew up in Hollywood, the son of two journalists-turned-lefty political types who introduced him to acting long before his 10th birthday. And the rest of it? We watched it unfold, through various hairstyles and adolescent voice changes, for six seasons on a hit TV show.

We saw him evolve from fringe-character cuteness to leading role handsomeness. We saw him dodge interview questions and, at least in front of the late show cameras, act refreshingly his age. (“When I was younger, I pretty violently hated that part of my job,” he says, speaking of his early interactions with the press — and if you don’t believe him, search out early appearances on Conan or Jon Stewart, where he isn’t just uncomfortable, but downright pugnacious.) And we saw him quitting acting to study literature at Columbia, then quitting college for acting again — by no means the more familiar path for child actors (that would be powering through, flaming out, becoming a punchline), but definitely the more successful.

What he did then, in his early 20s, is the surprising part. Or maybe not so surprising, considering we’re talking about Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has gone to great pains to avoid falling into any particular kind of Hollywood mould.

Either way, it involves the Internet.

Perhaps more than any other celebrity right now — more than Ashton Kutcher and his Silicon Valley investment streak, more than Will Ferrell and his Funny or Die! empire — Joseph Gordon-Levitt understands the power of the Internet. “I guess I’m an optimist,” he says. “There are plenty of possible pitfalls. But the Internet has the power to bring the human race together in a way it’s never come together before. I find that beautiful. But it’s up to us to decide how to use it.”

To that end, Gordon-Levitt is the co-founder, along with his late brother Dan, of hitRECord, a television show, production company and online community of artists that encourages collaborative creation.

Members can upload a story they’ve written, or are in the process of writing, only to have an illustrator somewhere else — maybe even in another country — pick it up an illustrate it. Or visa versa. Or a whole group of people might contribute to a short screenplay, and then film it, and then score it, and then have produced a completed movie. Or Joe himself might star in it with one of his famous friends, like the videos he’s done with Parks and Recreation’s Ben Schwartz or Zooey Deschanel. And they do it all for real — they show at film festivals, record actual vinyl albums, produce a legitimate TV show, and if any money is made, it’s distributed accordingly.

I really think the media can be something that doesn’t just create isolated couch-potato behaviour.

“HitRECord started as a symbol, a mantra I’d repeat to myself through my early 20s,” he says. That was the period when he returned to acting, and when he was finding it hard to get the kind of work he wanted. “My whole life, other people had been rolling the camera, but I wanted to be the one pushing the record button. So I started making little videos, and I found it enormously fulfilling.”

The idea snowballed. Gordon-Levitt started putting those videos up on a website he and Dan built, and a community began forming around them — a community that wanted to participate in the creative activity, not just consume it.

He opened up the platform to allow that to happen, brought in a few new partners, started figuring out how to make these things real, moneymaking ventures, which culminated last year in an Emmy nomination for the televised version, “A New Kind of Variety Show,” according to its tagline.

“I really think the media can be something that doesn’t just create isolated couch-potato behaviour,” he says. “It can be a way for people to come together and understand each other, and make each other laugh and make each other sing. It doesn’t have to be so transactional. We don’t have to use technology to do the same things we always did.”

At hitRECord, Gordon-Levitt makes a point of doing things differently. And he does so by attempting to straddle two very different roles. On the one hand, there’s his persona as creative facilitator and fun-loving television host, an endlessly youthful and exuberant figure who’s both tech-savvy and creatively confident.

And then, in the online forums he hosts weekly and the written treatises he posts to his Facebook page, there’s the strong, down-to-earth businessman, a company co-founder and, possibly, Silicon Valley-style visionary. The unifying factor: both parts of him want to make cool shit. At the end of the day, it’s all about the work.

Luckily, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good at his job. His yearning to do good work — work that’s totally off-the wall and totally his own — has led him down some pretty formidable paths, even within the confines of traditional Hollywood movie-making. He favours directors with a collaborative spirit and with something to say because, as he puts it, “the medium of movies belongs to the director. Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to work with a director I admire, I’ve jumped at the chance.”

That list includes Rian Johnson (Looper), Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) and Steven Spielberg (Lincoln). And it includes himself, with 2013’s Don Jon, a movie about love and porn addiction that he wrote, directed and starred in.

Put another way: Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes being a movie star look fucking easy.

For an even clearer picture, look at Gordon-Levitt’s slated big-screen releases for the rest of 2015. First, there’s The Walk, a Robert Zemeckis-directed 3-D blockbuster about Philippe Petit, the man who famously tight-roped between the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in 1974. Then there’s Snowden, an Oliver Stone-directed biopic of the infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden. And then there’s The Night Before, an Evan Goldberg-written, Jonathan Levine-directed stoner comedy co-starring Seth Rogen and Anthony Mackie, about a group of dudes who get fucked up and into trouble on the night before Christmas.

There it all is, laid out in advance-sale ticket stubs: a trilogy of movies so disparate in tone, style and perceived audience it’s hard to believe they have any unifying presence. They’re a trio of movies that showcase Gordon-Levitt’s unique ageless quality, his unnerving blend of borderline camp big-Hollywood nostalgia (The Walk), old man seriousness (Snowden) and boyish slacker charm (The Night Before). These are the tenets of a modern movie star — the three pillars upon which fame can be not only achieved, but kindly so.

Or put another way: Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes being a movie star look fucking easy. Yes, it’s true, the man has had almost three decades of practice, having been in commercials since he was six and having anchored a Disney feature, Angels in the Outfield, at 13. But he also seems to genuinely espouse the one intangible thing audiences are looking for, and that other actors seem desperately trying to fake: “I love my job,” he says, emphasizing the word love just barely, just in that way that only people telling the truth can do. He might be a quiet guy, a thinker, a serious man. But he’s doing the work he wants to do. And he’s having a damn good time doing it.

Where his contemporaries might feel compelled to spend off nights playing games with Jimmy Fallon — a curse under which he’s not immune, having helped propel Lip Sync Battle into the mainstream with his renditions of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” — Gordon-Levitt comes by that all-business-all-fun dichotomy naturally. He’s already see-through, already known, already old and young, self-serious and self-effacing.

***

“I don’t think the future is any one thing,” say Gordon-Levitt. He’s talking about the future of media, denying the idea that sites like hitRECord will be the only way people consume cultural products five or 10 or 25 years from now. And maybe he’s right about that, but only by default. He is, after all, a guy building a quiet online empire for collaboration and creation, while also pursuing an acting career that, as it stands, has him as one of the biggest stars — action, comedy, romantic or otherwise — in the world right now.

So excuse us for believing that if the future of Hollywood was anything — any one thing — it might not be Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it is fully in his hands. Which is a good thing, since he has that singular talent for holding many disparate things together. It’s like we said: he’s a deeper, ironic thing tucked insidiously inside a seemingly innocent thing.

He’s a writer and director inside an actor, a disrupter insider a rule follower, an old soul inside a young man’s body. He’s timeless, in the truest sense of the word: reverent of the past, concerned with the future and, more than anything, just plain killing it in the here and now. Take it from him: “It’s an incredible time to be alive.”