Kevin Dupzyk’s profile of Sam Rockwell, a “legendary scene-stealer” now in his fourth decade of work, is a crisp and entertaining one-act, with journalist and actor holed up in a spare Manhattan greenroom. Dupzyk studies Rockwell while Rockwell studies the room, testing the durability of his own idiosyncratic observations—about Red Bull and loss and rain—to see what they might yield in a conversation with a stranger. Dupzyk had wanted to “gin up some action for this story,” but it’s strangely compelling to watch Rockwell’s gaze prowl the room, to see what lodges in the filter of his creative process.

Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—

“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.

“Like, a monkey?” I say, confused.

Pat Caldwell is 69 years old and, as Chris Stanton gushes in this uproarious Q&A, “a legend to IMAX nerds.” Caldwell loves Vision3 film stock, hates Joker: Folie à Deux, and has discovered more than one dead body in a movie theater. His decades-long career as a projectionist includes a stint at a Tennessee porn theater with “very good equipment,” and he once spent half a year screening Lawrence of Arabia four times daily. When Stanton reached out to Caldwell on the occasion of The Odyssey, he may have landed the year’s most entertaining interview.

So Sam taught me how to run the projectors, and he got drunk, passed out on the couch. And after the concession stand in the box office closed, I would go up and run the rest of the movies for him. This went very nicely until one night there’s a knock at the door. I opened the door and here’s this old man standing there. And I said, “Well, who are you?” He says, “I could ask the same question. Who are you? I’m the business agent of the local projectionists’ union.” I explained what was going on. He woke up Sam, chewed him out. And the next day they made me an apprentice. I trained for a year with no pay at all the local theaters in Nashville.

What moves the star of Jackass to risk his life for our entertainment? This “very serious investigation” involves interviews with friends and family, a surf trip to Malibu, a gag with a fake raccoon, and a stop at In-N-Out:

He nosed the car into the drive-through line, drawing stares as he nosed—some for the vehicle, some for the driver. Mostly male stares. A teen-age boy stepped up to the passenger window and leaned in to take his order.

“One hamburger with tomato, lettuce, and mustard,” Knoxville said. “Fries, please. And a cup of water.”

“Onion?”

“No, sir.”

The teen-ager squinted. “You look familiar. Are you famous, by any chance?”

“Actually, completely by chance!” Knoxville improvised.