THE PICTURES: SIDEKICK

The actor Paul Walter Hauser emerged onto Fifth Avenue to pick up an açai bowl from a guy on a bicycle, then headed back up to his hotel room. He wore slippers, shorts, and a black tank top that exposed his biceps tattoos: on the right arm, his nineties comedy heroes (“Short & Stern & Farley & Varney & Carrey & Williams”); on the left, “1 Corinthians, 6:19-20” (“Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”). “I was in a weight-loss challenge with my brother-in-law,” he explained. “We said whoever loses has to get that tattoo, which is very like my family: just hella religious and extreme decisions. I lost thirty-five pounds. Then I booked ‘I, Tonya’ and had to put it all back on.”

- By Michael Schulman

“I, Tonya,” in which Hauser played one of the bumbling lowlifes who plans an attack on Nancy Kerrigan, was his breakout role. Since then, he’s been a dognapper (“Cruella”), a Klansman (“BlacKkKlansman”), a serial killer (“Black Bird,” for which he rapped his Emmy acceptance speech), the emotion Embarrassment (“Inside Out 2”), and the title character in Clint Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell,” about the security guard who discovered a pipe bomb at the 1996 Olympics and was then falsely suspected of planting it. Hauser has cornered the market on a certain kind of meaty, cloddish, yet affable Everyman, his roles a confederacy of scene-stealing dunces. This summer, he plays Liam Neeson’s police sidekick in a “Naked Gun” reboot, a lovesick ranch hand in “Americana,” and Mole Man, a subterranean supervillain, in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”