Jason Sudeikis has a gilded status as a Hollywood clown and a glossy fiancee in Olivia Wilde (of House fame).

In his cinematic foray, We’re The Millers, the 37-year-old Sudeikis stars as a Denver-based pot dealer who changes his hairstyle and his surname in order to pass off as a tourist and smuggle drugs across the Mexican border. It’s a slick and funny film, a meld of Pineapple Express and Addams Family Values, with Jennifer Aniston as the phoney wife.

But the movie also serves as a neat calling card for Sudeikis. When he was a kid, his uncle, George Wendt, had a long-running gig playing Norm, the mordant barfly in the sitcom Cheers. While Sudeikis remembered going to visit him in LA, he stressed that he was never especially drawn to that world in his youth. Instead, he dreamed of becoming a professional athlete. But when that did not pan out (he played college basketball for a time), he turned to comedy. He performed improv in Chicago, Amsterdam and Las Vegas, shouting to be heard above the whir of the slot machines.

In 2003, he landed a job on Saturday Night Live, which has been his base for the past 10 years. Sudeikis wrote the scripts and cavorted on screen, doing impressions of everyone from Bill Clinton to Mel Gibson. But now he is moving on, giving movies a shot. In recent years he has cropped up in Hall Pass, Movie 43 and Horrible Bosses.

“Memorising lines is the biggest difference,” he said. “On Saturday Night Live, things keep changing up until the very last second, so that’s why we use cue cards. But in film there are no cue cards, at least not yet, not until you become Marlon Brando and start sticking bits of face tape on the actor you’re talking to.

“If I tried that now, I don’t think Jen would have liked it. In any case, I don’t want to cover up Jennifer Aniston’s face with my Post-it notes. That’s vandalism.”

Right now he is in limbo since leaving Saturday Night Live. Wilde has been helpful in this regard. Even so, it’s a weird time. On the one hand, he has the sense that he has somehow arrived. On the other, he can’t yet tell exactly where he has landed.

He explained that Wilde was going to accompany him to London, but he advised against it. He didn’t want her at a loose end while he promoted his movie, which, in hindsight, is ridiculous: She would have found something to do.

“I mean, I shouldn’t think, ‘Oh, just because you can’t be around me means you won’t have any fun, you’d just be channel surfing in a hotel room’,” he said. “Maybe that’s what I assume everyone’s doing when I’m not there. I assume that’s what you’ve been doing all your life, until this very moment.”

Sudeikis grinned: “But it’s okay, relax. I have arrived.” THE GUARDIAN