John Krasinski's Nice Guys Finish First

It's over.

With the release of his new movie, "Away We Go," John Krasinski can now be named the all-time champion: He is Perfect Relationship Guy.

As Jim Halpert, the funny, devoted beau of Pam on TV's "The Office," Krasinski had already made himself the reigning titleholder.

But with Burt Farlander, the actor has topped even himself. As the scruffy, futures-trading father-to-be in "Away We Go," Krasinski hits relationship guy apex: a charmingly clumsy man who proposes to his girlfriend every other day and will stop at nothing to make her laugh.

Once again Krasinski, smiling bashfully, is victorious. He owns the heart of the girl onscreen and her sighing sisters in the audience.

"It's just going to ruin my personal life forever," he says with a sigh.

It is an awful lot to live up to, this fictional status, but Krasinski doesn't do much to distance himself from the great-guy archetype. On the phone from Beverly Hills during one of a couple of dozen press interviews, the 29-year-old, who grew up outside Boston, is self-deprecating, witty and animated.

He is even willing to throw a few nuggets to fans who want to believe that something of Jim Halpert is true in John Krasinski.

"I'm a pretty sentimental guy. And I think that for me, romance is this thing that I take very seriously," says Krasinski, who won't comment on any current relationship of his own.

After reading the screenplay for "Away We Go," written by prodigious writer Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, Krasinski remembers telling his agent that it was one of the most resonant scripts he'd ever encountered -- especially in its depiction of the relationship between Burt and his longtime girlfriend, Verona (Maya Rudolph), who journey across North America to decide where to make a life for themselves.

"This is the first romance that was written on the page that was so incredibly well done that it was a couple that you believed in," the actor says. "To me it's one of the more romantic couples because it's not about the flowers and the diamonds. It's about the secret languages and the looks to one another where everything is said without any words. . . . It's not only a relationship you admire from a fictional standpoint, but you desperately want to be in that relationship."

Eggers has said he had Krasinski in mind for Burt even as he and Vida were writing the film. "That's what they say," Krasinski deadpans. "I want to make sure Dave knows I'm not Ryan Gosling."