It’s both intimidating and ironic to interview someone who’s made a career of playing an awful interviewer. Steve Coogan’s best-known character, Alan Partridge, is the fake media personality who—on BBC comedies Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge and I’m Alan Partridge—launched the actor into superstardom in the U.K. and cult status in the U.S. Coogan’s inept alter ego is notorious for poorly researching his subjects (he mistakes Roger Daltrey for Roger Waters during a chat with The Who legend), being vain and all-around closed-minded, and delivering painfully cheesy puns. (“If this show was a car,” he told his audience in a typical bit, “it would be…Chatty Chatty Bang Bang.”)

Coogan’s standout film performance as Factory Records cofounder/music impresario Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People put the British actor on the indie map in the U.S. and led to memorable roles in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and another Winterbottom feature, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which took on the daunting task of adapting Laurence Sterne’s “un-filmable,” ahead-of-its-time novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Despite adoration from critics—and more mainstream exposure with big-budget family films Night at the Museum (co-starring Owen Wilson) and Disney’s Around the World in 80 Days—Coogan still isn’t a bona fide movie star in the States. He joked in a New York Times profile that if he ever wants to be recognized, all he has to do is step into an indie record store to find 24 Hour Party People fans. More Americans might know him today from a 2007 New York Post article that tied him, via comments from ex-girlfriend Courtney Love, to hard drug use and Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt—allegations that he dismisses here as “horse shit.”

With a pivotal role in Ben Stiller’s blockbuster Tropic Thunder and a starring slot in Hamlet 2 (one of the few success stories at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival), Coogan could lose that anonymity on American soil. Interestingly, Coogan plays misguided directors in both. He’s the “method” Hollywood director of a big-budget Vietnam War drama being made in Tropic Thunder. He’s a Tulsa drama teacher who casts himself as Sexy Jesus in his original high school production in Hamlet 2. Both characters are passionate and dedicated but ultimately not particularly talented.

Which brings us back to Partridge, the all-style-no-substance media type Coogan saw come to prevalence in the U.K. in the 1990s. Partridge has become both the catalyst and bane of his acting career. “Because Alan Partridge was a very successful show for me in the U.K., anything I do often gets compared to that. That’s not very healthy for me ’cause I want things to be judged by themselves, on their own,” he says. To “exorcise his fears,” this October Coogan returns to the stage for the first time in a decade with his one-man show Steve Coogan Is Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters.

Although Coogan is still cynical about entertainment, he doesn’t come off as the fussy cultural critic one might expect. During our interview, he knocked “snobbish elitism” as “stifling,” and when we sat down with him, he was well-mannered, dry-witted and, refreshingly, not bent at all on self-promotion. As our talk steered away from the reason for this interview, Hamlet 2, to topics like why great BBC shows don’t get picked up in the States or butting heads with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he became a sort of anti-Partridge: all substance and no fluff.

Playboy: You play Jesus in Hamlet 2. Did you research the role?

Coogan: Jesus, no, I just loaded on carbs and prayed a lot.

Playboy: Do you prefer the Old or New Testament?

Coogan: Oh, New Testament. The Old Testament is too kind of scary. I’m a liberal, so the New Testament resonates with me. The Old Testament is just a bit too, uh, unforgiving. I wouldn’t survive long in an Old Testament world. Yeah, I’d be stoned to death by now.

Playboy: Many of the characters you play are ambitious but don’t have an iota of talent. What attracts you to these characters?

Coogan: It’s kind of cathartic. It’s almost like I gravitate toward stuff like that because I feel like, if I play a jerk who’s got no talent, then people won’t think that about me. It’s a way of exorcising your fears. I’m always scared of being seen as an asshole, so if you go out there and try to be the biggest asshole possible, you stop being scared of it.

Playboy: Why does it make for good comedy?

Coogan: It’s an old, old profession. There’ve always been fools; the king will always have a fool, the court jester, the ass. It makes people feel secure, I guess.

Playboy: At the same time, there’s a sweetness to your characters that makes you not want to ridicule them.

Coogan: If they’re just contemptible, people wouldn’t want to watch them for that long, beyond 20 minutes of them doing dumb, funny things. I like to set myself with challenges, like, “Can I make this person who’s really unlikable…can I make the audience care? Can I dare the audience to care about someone who has got a lot of faults?” I like seeing the humanity of people who are screwed up.

Playboy: You were the subject of some particularly damning tabloid gossip last year after Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt. How did you deal with that?

Coogan: It’s a pain in the ass, but all you can do is tell people that stuff gets put up there that is…I certainly don’t want to get into justifying myself, but what I can say is that the stuff that happened with Owen, the stuff that was alleged to happen with Owen, is utter and complete horse shit from beginning to end.