WILLIAM JACKSON HARPER

Harper, 41, star of The Good Place and The Underground Railroad, returns to comedy in Love Life (Oct. 28 on HBO Max). He joins season two of the anthology series about dating in New York City as book editor Marcus Watkins, who’s newly single after a long-term relationship with the woman he thought was Ms. Right.

Why did Love Life click with you? The first season felt more nuanced than a typical rom-com meet-cute with a bunch of foibles and then everyone rides off into the sunset. It felt like a character study of a woman in her 20s [Anna Kendrick] dealing with life in New York, and a large part of that is who do you date? It leaned away from the feel-good aspect and dived into the stuff where it gets a little thorny and uncomfortable.

Marcus is a bit of chameleon, isn’t he? In certain rooms he adopts a certain style of communication, and then in other rooms he adopts another. But I don’t think that it’s a huge put-on or a shift. It’s just, “I want to be able to communicate my ideas to this group of people, and what’s the best way to do that?”

What do you miss about The Good Place? I really miss my castmates. I really miss the crew. It’s just a great group of people to work with. It was my biggest job up until that time, and so I was delightfully surprised at how kind everyone was, how much fun it was to work on that set, how lowstress it was just because everyone was so great.

If you had to pick, do you more resemble Chidi from The Good Place or Marcus from Love Life? Marcus, easy. Chidi is hyperverbal and he likes to talk out his neuroses. I don’t. There are times where Marcus bites his tongue and he has some things that are somewhat unresolved, but that’s closer to me than Chidi will ever be.