On a chilly January afternoon, the actor Jason Mantzoukas, wide-eyed and bearded, tramped the streets of Manhattan with an air of light melancholy. He saw a pharmacy that had once been a bar, a bank branch that had replaced a cafe where he used to go for soup.
He had booked a private walking tour dedicated to “Sex and the City” locations because he genuinely loves the show and because he thought that after a decade and a half in Los Angeles it might make for a fizzy exercise in revisiting his New York days. But the tour guide, a sweet, distractible man, seemed to care little for Carrie Bradshaw and her cohort, so the walk veered a little weird and sad.
But weird is comfortable for Mantzoukas, 53, perhaps the only man alive to have voiced both a talking penis (in “Pam & Tommy”) and a talking bee (“Dickinson”). He has spent the last decade and a half as a classic sitcom “that guy’’ — a guest star who pops in for a few episodes to goose the absurdity.
After a breakout turn on the improvised FX sitcom “The League,” he played a skeevy perfumer on “Parks and Rec,” a nonhuman boyfriend with wind chime genitals on “The Good Place,” a horny teenager with an unhealthy attachment to his pillow on “Big Mouth,” an undercover cop with gnarly PTSD on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” a contractor who sometimes mistakes house paint for hummus on the most recent season of “A Man on the Inside.” Since 2010, he has co-hosted the movie deconstruction podcast “How Did This Get Made?,” and he has a recurring role on the Disney+ series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” which just completed its second season. He plays Mr. D., better known to gods and demigods as Dionysus, god of wine and revelry. Obviously.
“There is no limit to the insanity,” Mike Schur, a frequent collaborator, said. He meant this as a compliment. The director Alex Timbers, who is working with Mantzoukas now, called him a “winged angel of anarchy.”
Mantzoukas had returned to New York not only for the tour, but also to make an odd detour in what is already a twisty career. An irrepressible comic, he is currently repressing himself as a star of “All Out: Comedy About Ambition,” a Broadway show in which actors perform stories written by Simon Rich. Styled as an antic stage reading and featuring a revolving cast of comic performers, the show leaves little room for improvisation or clowning beyond what the pages provides.
“I was like, This sounds cool as hell,” Mantzoukas said. His stint only lasts until Feb. 15, he noted, so he wouldn’t have to say the same words for long.
After some mild confusion, the tour guide led him to Carrie’s stoop on Perry Street. Mantzoukas noted where a Kim’s Video once stood, then pointed out a townhouse on Bedford Street that has variously housed Cary Grant, Margaret Mead and the emo poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“Sorry,” he apologized to the tour guide. “I’m not trying to steal your thunder.”
It may disappoint fans to learn that offstage and off mic, Mantzoukas is pleasantly normal. One more potential bummer: He doesn’t love fan interaction. (He is, nevertheless, an enthusiastic fan himself and has talked himself onto shows like “Taskmaster” and “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” through sheer ardor.) When admirers approached him on the street, he agreed to selfies with the slight stoicism of a man who has committed to a habit he doesn’t enjoy, like eating leafy greens.
Mantzoukas grew up lonely and fragile, a consequence of a severe egg allergy that often landed him in the hospital. Comedy offered a reprieve, a release. He hadn’t planned on performing it professionally. But after earning a degree in religion from Middlebury College and completing a postgraduate fellowship studying transcendental music in North Africa and the Middle East, he found his way to the burgeoning scene at the New York City branch of Upright Citizens Brigade.
Though he became known as a fearless improviser and a sharp comedy writer, he couldn’t get cast in TV or film. Asked which “Sex and the City” character he resembled, the tour guide tagged him as one of the Hot Fellas from the sequel series “And Just Like That. …” But two decades ago, casting directors told him he was not handsome enough to play leads, not schlubby enough for best friends and indeterminately ethnic (he is Greek American) in a way that isn’t quite commercial.
Then in 2011, he was hired for an arc on “The League,” where he was given liberty to create his character. He studied the show, analyzing the archetypes, then told the showrunners that what they needed was a maniac.
“And I can do a good maniac,” he said.
For a while that mania defined him. His type, in his words: dirtbag, scumbag, creepy neighbor, sketchy uncle He didn’t mind it. The characters gave him a freedom to exorcise things in his life that felt scary and overwhelming. They weren’t anxious; they weren’t germophobes.
Schur, who has cast him in many shows, spoke of the profound relief of knowing that whatever madness a writer concocted, Mantzoukas could improve on it. “Whenever you’re in a situation where you’re like, this is an insane character, your brain immediately goes to him,” Schur said.
Mantzoukas knows how to be funny, and outrageousness comes easy. He get nervous, he said, when he is asked to play something more naturalistic, more believable. Even the serious moments of “Percy Jackson” throw him.
“The only time I get into trouble is when I need to deliver real emotion or exposition,” he said. “I don’t know how to do a thing that has no funny element.” In those moments, he said, he is tempted to turn to the director and ask, “Is this working?”
So far, it’s working. Walker Scobell, who plays Percy, said that on camera it is impossible to keep up with Mantzoukas: “He’s too quick; he’s too smart.” Off camera, he found Mantzoukas, whom he had associated with his monster characters, surprisingly kind.
“In real life, he’s somehow just as funny but also one of the nicest people ever,” Scobell said.
Mantzoukas guards that niceness. Even on podcasts and on a panel show like “Taskmaster,” he is playing a persona, a heightened, more abrasive version of himself. It’s a well-honed bit. It is also a kind of armor for someone who didn’t get famous until his 40s and still isn’t entirely comfortable with it.
“Anytime I’m observed, I’m not me,” he said. “I’m still very protective of the actual me.”
The next day he would begin rehearsals for “All Out.” If scripted theater is a new genre for him, the characters he plays — a cannibal sea captain, a cave man prostitute, a space chimp — are very much up his bizarro alley, so he wouldn’t be asked to reveal his real self. And Timbers, the director of the show, was hoping that Mantzoukas would bring some of his comedy lawlessness to the stage.
“The thing with plays is that they can feel really routine and really scripted,” he said. “I’m always looking for actors who are going to bring a sense of danger and unpredictability.” Rich, the writer, noting Mantzoukas’s talent for expression and invention, went a step further.
“We should probably just let him improvise,” he wrote in an email.
The walking tour, which had deteriorated pleasantly into locations from “Friends,” an O. Henry story and a Taylor Swift song, ended at the Jefferson Market Library, the site of a “Sex and the City” wedding. Mantzoukas seemed pleased.
“That was great,” he said. “It really could not have been more diametrically opposed to what I was picturing.”
These days, Mantzoukas feels like he’s improvising a little less, offstage anyway. The steady career he spent so long scrambling for — he has it now. It took a while to get there and the route wasn’t obvious, but he likes where it has led him.
“This sounds corny to say, but I’m having fun with other people,” he said. “I’m making people laugh. That’s it. That’s the job.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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