"Timothy Olyphant"

Before the guest arrives, the hosts run a confession round: Jason copied answers off neighbours in USC-sized lecture halls, Will shoplifted a 25-cent bag of chips at about 11 and came back the next day to leave a quarter on the counter, and Sean was actually arrested — drunk, in college, for stealing a turkey sandwich from a White Hen, mouthing off in the squad car and sitting in the station until a stranger posted $100. Olyphant answers in kind with an Eric Roberts story from the Justified set: Roberts claimed double-digit arrests, half of them before he turned 18, including one for punching a cop.

The career talk is anchored in geography. Alien Earth shot its first season in Bangkok — magical, punishingly hot — and when the choice for season two came down to London or Budapest, Olyphant's reaction to getting London was still deflation that it couldn't just shoot in L.A. He knows how lucky he had it: Deadwood ran three years, Justified six, and Santa Clarita Diet after that, all shooting around Los Angeles while his kids grew up, so he was home for most of their childhood. He's now 35 years married and newly an empty nester, with a daughter currently at USC. His own path there started in Modesto, where his mother talked him out of comedy dreams by insisting show people were all divorced and on drugs; he went to USC as a fine-art major, left without the degree, and finally completed it decades later in an independent study with his old professor Ruth Weisberg — then spoke at the fine-arts graduation, amused that the graduates had done in four years what took him about 32. Acting, he says with some honesty, was partly a conscious plan to get a midlife crisis out of the way early; he also crossed stand-up off the list at the Boston Comedy Club near the Comedy Cellar.

The best stretch is director stories. On Deadwood, some off-camera problem around the child actor playing his ward ended with David Milch knocking on his trailer at lunch to announce the kid's character would be killed off — pitched to Olyphant, in classic showbiz fashion, as a great opportunity for everyone including the kid — and that swerve became the season's arc. Soderbergh gave him effectively one performance note in three months, a scale-of-one-to-ten score delivered in a car. Bradley Cooper, operating the camera himself on Is This Thing On?, would lower the lens inches from his face and demand no acting. Michael Bay, operating a crane shot at a Ninja Turtles shoot in Madison Square Garden, whipped the camera onto him mid-chaos and ordered him to say something funny. And David Fincher had him do a brief Adventures of Cliff Booth scene for a day and a half — around 30 takes — which Olyphant compares to pledging a fraternity: the repetition erodes your instincts until you stop performing and just say the lines, which he suspects is the point.

The wrap-up covers the slate — Lucky, an Apple TV thriller with Anya Taylor-Joy and Annette Bening written by Jonathan Tropper; The Five Star Weekend with Jennifer Garner on Peacock; renewed second seasons of Alien Earth and Stick; and Larry David's HBO special for the U.S. 250th anniversary, in which Olyphant plays one of the Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral while Sean and Jon Hamm play the Wright brothers. The running joke throughout is that Olyphant owns no computer, had to borrow an office to record, and claims he keeps up with SmartLess by reading transcripts mailed to him.