Maybe he could play Lear or Hamlet, but there's no need for Thomas Haden Church to try when he can so fully inhabit likable doofuses. Could Laurence Olivier have played Jack Lopate, the ex–TV star who goes on a weeklong wine-tasting toot with his pal Miles (Paul Giamatti) in the widely laureled comedy Sideways? For that matter, could Jack find a more engaging explicator than the genial Texan who plays him?

It helps that Church, 43, who commutes from his Kerrville, Texas, ranch to Hollywood, was Jack, sort of. He won TV fame as the mechanic Lowell on Wings, then as the male half of Ned and Stacey before fading out of sight, though not out of sound. "Jack does voice-over work," he says in his leathery baritone, "which I have done off and on for 20 years, which can provide you with a handsome living. In Jack's driveway you will see only late-model luxury vehicles. He has his own confidence, financial and otherwise."

But some things mean more than a fat paycheck. Like a happy kid who has never learned how to play it cool, Church loves—luuuuvs—the acclaim he has received as Jack. "All these years after I moved to L.A.—it's wonderful!"

You've earned all that wonder, Jack. Sorry ... Thomas.

—By Richard Corliss
Reported by Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles