Before Jake Lacy became Shane, the odious newlywed in last year’s smash-hit class satire The White Lotus, the 37-year-old actor was famous for playing nice guys. Not just good guys, but human beings so exceedingly pleasant in looks and affect that they could only be fiction.

In HBO’s Girls, for example, Lacy was Fran, the kindly schoolteacher who still offered Hannah a ride after she dumped him hundreds of miles from home. In the 2020 remake of High Fidelity, he played a harmless rock-climbing fanatic – the guy you date when you’re on the rebound from heartache.

Lacy thinks the nicest guy he ever played – I asked – was probably Ken from the film How to Be Single, a goofy one-night stand who coasts into unexpected fatherhood with uncanny aplomb. “But that’s a caricature almost,” Lacy says. “The idea of a nice guy.”

That said, the actor is incorrect.