Adam Brody is an excellent sport. During his photoshoot for MR PORTER, he wears mohair in the blazing LA heat, submerges himself in a swimming pool in a LOEWE tracksuit and regales the crew with stories – funny ones – while balancing a martini on his head. When asked if he’d mind skateboarding for a shot, he picks up the board, no questions asked, hot coffee still in hand. From an insurance perspective, I’m on edge; as a devotee of The OC, I couldn’t be more thrilled. Perhaps I should come clean right from the off: Adam Brody was my first big crush. I’ve had to keep my cool around many attractive men in my career, but reader, this was my Everest. And as a long-time fan of Brody’s, in this moment, I feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven.

Watching Brody skate down the driveway of a multi-million-dollar house in California, it’s easy to see why the actor and Seth Cohen, his breakout role in The OC, which ran for four seasons in the 2000s, are often presented as interchangeable. The show’s creator and writer, Josh Schwartz, has even described the character as 50 per cent Brody and 50 per cent himself. But it was Brody who brought the wry wit, off-beat charisma – and his taste in indie music.

Wiry, neurotic and suffused with a deep knowledge of comic books and Death Cab for Cutie, Seth Cohen was a different kind of teen-drama heartthrob. In a genre long dominated by brooding bad boys and jocks, his unapologetic geekiness and emotional vulnerability felt like a cultural shift. “I think certainly in pop culture, he helped usher in a new archetype of what a cool kid, or a romantic kid, or the hero of a story could be,” Brody tells me over a green juice and a breakfast burrito – hold the chorizo – in Santa Monica. I suggest that he’s being modest (a personality trait, I quickly learn). The character gave permission to a whole generation of adolescent boys to be themselves. “Yeah,” he nods his head in (modest) acquiescence. “It’s a very satisfying thing that I’m still hearing about: that people saw, or see, themselves represented in him.”

As with assuming that Seth and Brody are one and the same, it would be just as easy to pigeonhole Brody as a “nice guy”. Which is exactly what Emerald Fennell was counting on when she cast him in 2020’s Promising Young Woman, a genre-bending revenge thriller that dissected the insidious depths of rape culture. “If you’re going to make a movie about good people doing bad things, you need actors [that] people instantly trust,” Fennell told GQ. “Sam Richardson, Adam Brody, these are people that we all feel fondly towards and are totally crushable.”

Brody’s performance in the film proved he was more than capable of playing against type. At first glance, his character Jerry seems to be, in Brody’s own words, “a facsimile of Seth Cohen”, with the same floppy-haired, self-effacing charm. And that’s the trick: in his brief but deeply unsettling turn as a “nice guy” who’s anything but, Brody delivers one of the most plausibly disarming performances of his career.

Not that this was the only time that Brody has subverted the charm that made him a household name. Fans of Diablo Cody’s horror cult classic Jennifer’s Body will remember him as Nikolai Wolf, an initially charming, but ultimately satanic rock star with a penchant for eyeliner. If not outrightly evil, his more recent characters have leaned decidedly away from the straightforwardly likeable. He plays another Seth (Morris, this time), a finance bro with a Peter Pan complex in the TV adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Fleishman Is In Trouble. Or his Wiley Valdespino in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction (2023), a smug filmmaker whose virtue signalling barely masks his own self-interest. They are familiar – uncomfortably so – not just as individuals, but as avatars of the systems that reward certain kinds of men.

Last year, Brody returned to our screens in Netflix’s hit show Nobody Wants This. Inspired by creator Erin Foster’s real-life experience of converting to Judaism, the show follows Noah (Brody), a basketball-playing, pot-smoking rabbi on the rebound, and Joanne (Kristen Bell), a snarky, perennially single podcaster with faith in neither God nor men, as they fall in love. It packs a sparkly sucker punch of serotonin and has been credited with kick-starting the renaissance of the romantic comedy.

The show’s success could, I suggest, be because, collectively, the world needs both those things – romance and comedy – now more than ever. Does Brody agree?

“I think, removed from even the time we’re living in, this fucking dystopian moment – actually, I won’t remove it: we are in a dystopian moment! But also, it’s just that it hasn’t been around, and it’s a beloved genre,” he says. “Just because of trends and shifting media landscapes and viewing habits, it was out of fashion for a moment. But it’s a classic for a reason. It goes back to It Happened One Night and Shakespeare. I’m sure it’ll be around forever in some form. But to some degree, it was to our advantage that we had the playing field to ourselves.”

The second season is, as often happens with well-crafted comedies, even better. It’s funnier, for one thing: the writers seem to have taken the individual strengths of the cast – Timothy Simons’ comic timing, Justine Lupe’s capacity for scene-stealing – and written specifically to them. Add to that a handful of big-name cameos, including Brody’s wife, Leighton Meester.

The day I meet Brody is the first day of Rosh Hashanah – although, despite playing two of television’s most-loved Jews, the actor himself isn’t religious. He was raised in the faith, complete with a “perfunctory bar mitzvah”, but describes himself as agnostic. Perhaps for that reason, Brody put a huge amount of effort and energy into learning before he took on the role of Rabbi Roklov: reading, watching and generally immersing himself in the Jewish culture while the Sag-Aftra strike put production on pause.

Method actor he is not. But he has an overarching curiosity not just about his roles, but life in general. He asks me questions – not loads, but enough to prove he acknowledges me as a person, not just a means to his own publicity. And while preparing for this interview, I was continually struck by how engaged he is with the world – a world that, crucially, extends past the boundaries of Hollywood. Asked in one profile if he had any advice for his younger self, his answer was simple: “read, read, read”.

With Brody reprising the role of a Jewish heartthrob, the comparisons between him and his character came thick and fast once more. However, the truth is that the actor is far more self-aware than either Seth or Noah, neither of whom seem to realise that they’re a touch whiny (Seth), emotionally inconsistent (Noah) or slightly self-involved (both). Brody, on the other hand, offers up his flaws without being asked. “I certainly love being a boyfriend then husband,” he tells me, “Not to say that I don’t have plenty of deficiencies in all those areas.”

Go on, I say. “I’m very loving and affectionate, but I definitely fall short in the romantic gesture department,” he admits. “I’ve also never had to be too independent. There are things – everyday things – that I’ve gotten away with not worrying about.”

Like what? “Like how to do a lot of adult stuff. I can barely use a computer. I didn’t make coffee for myself until I was in my mid-thirties.”

He’s visibly mortified by his own confession. And yet, given that he has been a celebrity for half his life, his emotional grounding is frankly miraculous. For this, he credits his parents (“I knew they were a safe place. I think as parents, you can do nothing to influence your child’s personality, but you can do a lot to influence their relationships”) and becoming a parent himself (“It’s made me more emotionally available and in touch. I just found that I have a more readily accessible well of emotion”). But mostly, he puts it down to his wife. “She’s very smart and emotionally intelligent,” he says. “She’s definitely been a huge factor in my well-being and emotional honesty or awareness.” And it was Meester who finally taught him to make coffee.

Family is clearly paramount to his life. Brody gives me his undivided attention for almost every one of the 90 minutes we speak (30 more than he’s obliged to), with the only interruption to check his phone for updates on his kids.

“First and foremost, and best, it’s a love like I’ve never known,” he tells me when I ask about parenting. “And there’s no question that it’s made me grow up. I’m 10 times the adult I was before.”

But he doesn’t see fatherhood through rose-tinted spectacles. “It’s the most work you’ll do in your life,” he says. “I don’t want to generalise; everyone’s different. But just for me, it is the most work I’ve ever done. It’s much easier to go to work and work for 12 hours. So much fucking easier. But there’s such pride in hard work.”

It’s the same diligent approach that is evident during his time with MR PORTER, where he gives our small crew the same respect you’d expect to see on a big-budget movie. He workshops lines with the director, stays until well after our scheduled wrap time and is as invested as we are in getting the killer closing shot. He clearly loves his job – and never takes it for granted.

“It’s been such a charmed life,” he says. “You get to be as creative and as playful as a child, but as thoughtful as you can possibly be. You get to have the work-life balance of working really hard in a camp-like environment and then having time off to be with your family, to do what you want. You’re forced to travel and explore a lot of different places and actually be there for a minute, where you can really absorb it. At the same time, you don’t have to really move anywhere else to make the money you get to make. Then you get to be celebrated for it? It’s unreal.”

How does he unwind when he isn’t working? Not by skateboarding, as Seth Cohen might. Different board. “Surfing is this beautiful blend of sport and music,” Brody says. “It’s a forced meditation. I don’t have the interest in really meditating, even though I’ve no doubt it would be beneficial. But this forces you to be in touch with the elements and the tide and the horizon and the waves. There’s a competitiveness that I get with surfing, too, in terms of, ‘Oh, here’s a skill. How can I get better at it?’”

The photoshoot takes place the day after our interview. Greeting me on this second occasion, Brody is warm, but his face quickly turns serious. There’s something important he’d like to set straight. He learnt to make coffee in his early-thirties, not his mid-thirties, he deadpans. A crucial distinction, I reply, endeared beyond belief at the idea of him replaying our conversation in his head.

It’s a dry joke at his own expense. But he also makes this correction not because he’s anxious about how he comes across. Whether it’s researching a role, or parenting, or surfing or getting the perfect shot, what he genuinely cares about is getting it right.