The Amiable, Accidental Star

Movie Time was subsumed by what became E!, and Kinnear was fired and then rehired to start a show with seemingly no budget and no hope, called "Talk Soup." It has since evolved into "The Soup" and is still on, and the template is markedly the same: They watch dreck so you don't have to, all the talk-show-reality-dramas-singing-and-dancing-contests siphoned into clips. Kinnear was among the first of a new species of humans who dwell on cable for the sole purpose of deadpan snark.

"We have two young children" -- Kinnear and his wife, Helen, have daughters named Lily, 5, and Audrey, 2 -- "and my wife pretty much limits any TV in the house. I have no idea what goes on in the world of shows like ["The Soup"] anymore. . . . But I was there at the beginning of it. [But] I am not Dr. Frankenstein. Don't blame me," he says, with mock protest.

He followed "Talk Soup" by replacing Bob Costas on the wee-hours NBC talk show that followed Jay and Conan. That show had a live audience (which unnerved Kinnear) and higher stakes, and when Sydney Pollack cast him in a 1995 remake of "Sabrina," Kinnear became an actor and never looked back.

"Though there's times, you know, people you'd just love to sit down with and get to ask them the questions," he says. "With the election, you know, to have access to them -- Obama, McCain. Sarah Palin."

But no, he says, that's not for him. He's too nice, always has been.

Even printing out the archive of old clips about Greg Kinnear is a pleasant experience and not quite a waste of toner. He's always good with a quip and never offensive and never part of a scandal, of any kind. Does TMZ even know he exists? Who out there has a voice mail of him screaming obscenities at an assistant?

Guess what? There is no assistant.

"Never needed one, I guess," Kinnear says. "I'm not sure what an assistant would do, except they'd be getting me lots of tea all the time, and I'd feel terrible about that."