TV Wednesday THE EX FACTOR

Ellis dishes on ‘Insecure’ relationship

A T the end of last season’s “Insecure,” many viewers wondered if Issa Dee, the character played by series creator Issa Rae, had lost her mind after cheating on her long-suffering boyfriend Lawrence (Jay Ellis) — who then walked out on her. “She didn’t know what she had,” says Ellis, sipping a gin cocktail at a downtown LA restaurant. Wearing a baseball cap with the name of the show’s seedy apartment complex — The Dunes — sewn on the front, Ellis, 35, speaks candidly about the sexual politics that permeate the HBO comedy, now in its second season. We see Issa swiping away her loneliness on Tinder while Lawrence lets total strangers pick him up at the supermarket. Is the dating scene in LA really that stark? “It’s tough, man,” Ellis says. “The culture of LA is bigger, better, faster. There’s always someone new around the corner.”

Besides its brazen portrayal of the war between the sexes, “Insecure” has flipped Hollywood’s stereotypical (and tedious) objectification of women by having the men do most of the undressing.

When he signed on to do the show, Ellis knew there would be some nudity involved, but admits “there are days where I’m like, ‘Really? Again?’ At the same time, I get it. Issa’s done something really cool with not gratuitously having women walking around buck-naked just for the sake of walking around buck naked.”

To that end, Ellis, under the pretext that “Lawrence is training for a marathon this season,” has been running “three, four miles every other day.” He has shed “12 pounds, 13 pounds” in the process. “I look very different on camera because of that,” he says.

Prior to “Insecure,” Ellis starred on BET’s “The Game” as Bryce Westbrook, the wide receiver draft pick from Stanford University, a character he describes as “super arrogant.” Ironically, Ellis says more guys come up to talk to him about Lawrence than the successful jock. Lawrence may be fighting off women, but Ellis says Lawrence is “lost” and cannot explain his own behavior. In one controversial moment coming up, Tasha (Dominique Perry), a bank teller he’s dating on the rebound, cuts him dead when he abandons her at her family’s picnic for a more tempting offer. Her insult of choice — the N word preceded by an F bomb — is so shocking it stops the show. Do women really call men that? “It’s a term that the ladies use right now,” Ellis says sheepishly. “Guys who take no responsibility in dating. They don’t plan on talking to [the women] after hooking up with them.”

Fortunately for Ellis, his own life is a lot more stable. Born on Shaw Air Force base near Fort Sumpter, SC, he’s an only child who was always on the move. “I was in 12 schools in 13 years,” he says. And he remains very close to his parents, who followed him to LA after his father, Wendell, retired.

“They live four miles away from me. I see them probably far too often,” he says. “So we try to do dinner once a week, once every two weeks. My dad and I go fishing out at the San Pedro pier. When we lived in Texas, we used to go deep-sea fishing down in the Gulf.”

Offering further proof he’s not Lawrence, Ellis describes himself as being in “a very happy, loving relationship,” although he won’t say with whom. Maybe it’s his own settled life that allows him to hold out a glimmer of hope for Issa and Lawrence.

“I think they still care about each other,” he says. “They need to figure out if they’re supposed to be with each other or not. They’re in the midst of trying to figure it out.”