In comedy, earnestness is a rare and potentially distracting quality. Too much smiling sincerity can soften the crunch of good humor. So it’s always nice to watch Jason Schwartzman on-screen, acting one notch past deadpan (and two notches past irony) so all the humor in the room evaporates and just hangs in the air like an intoxicating gas. It’s as if you’re simply laughing at his human nature—not because of a joke or a flashy “look at me” maneuver, but because this person’s basic response to the world is funny.

With surprising scope, Schwartzman has demonstrated this natural, easy comedy since he was a teenager. Under the direction of Edgar Wright, Wes Anderson, Judd Apatow, David O. Russell, and Sofia Coppola (his cousin), he’s crafted a variety of eccentric, iconic roles: Rushmore’s precocious Max Fischer (Schwartzman’s first acting role ever); the evil ex-boyfriend in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World; Marie Antoinette’s awkward Louis XVI. Schwartzman’s most recent role is for television, as a private eye on Jonathan Ames’s HBO show, Bored to Death. His character—who is also named Jonathan Ames—comes out of a long lineage of hard-boiled private dicks; but unlike the austere loners of film noir, Schwartzman’s character is a fallible, marijuana-loving writer in Brooklyn, unable to finish his second novel.

As a musician, Schwartzman played for nine years with the “California” rock band Phantom Planet, but left the group in 2003 and began releasing solo music as Coconut Records. His two albums under that name recall the songwriting tradition of ’70s folk rock like Harry Nilsson and the understated Brit-pop of the mid-’90s. He sings, plays the whole spectrum of rock instruments, possesses a deep knowledge of pop music from the last fifty years, and wrote the spy-jazz theme for Bored to Death.

Schwartzman and I met in Cobble Hill Park, near his apartment and the streets through which he and Zach Galifianakis often take jaunts on his show. On meeting, Schwartzman was ebullient. His enthusiasm for film, music, and even the art of the interview spilled out of him. He paced with a tea in hand and responded to questions with astonishingly good intentions, always making sure to explore both sides of an argument, continuously insisting that any opinion he holds is ephemeral and likely to change at any minute.

—Ross Simonini

I. WHERE DO YOU GET THESE BAGELS?

JASON SCHWARTZMAN: Is this an article?

THE BELIEVER: It’s a Q&A. It’s just going to be a conversational kind of thing. A transcript.

JS: There’ll be so many uhs and buts and everything. It’s gonna be so…

BLVR: Don’t worry. We’ll edit it. You’ll just...