It's OK, he wants you to cringe

AFTER THE very first airing of the very first episode of the British version of "The Office," Ricky Gervais, the series' star and co-creator, was offered leads in a slew of movies.

"It was ridiculous," Gervais says succinctly.

"They were premature," he continues with dismay, before launching into what appears to be a favored mode of expression -- the acerbic comic tirade. "Who would go see a bloke who had one hit from a sitcom? People leap way too early [into films] through vanity, fear or flattery. They think, 'I'm making a film.' You're making a film that no one is going to see! You have no power. You're going to go in there like a grateful little puppy and you're going to do what everybody says. And it's rubbish. It's going to be advertised on the side of buses for a week and then go straight to DVD."

Those initial movie offers came back in 2001. Now, seven years later, the 47-year-old Brit is in a Los Angeles hotel room promoting "Ghost Town," the first film in which he stars, along with Tea Leoni and Greg Kinnear. This supernatural comedy is written by David Koepp and John Kamps (and directed by Koepp), but it's hard to imagine a part better suited to Gervais. In the film, he plays a cranky New York dentist who dies briefly during an operation, and when he wakes up he can see dead people -- and they annoy him.

Gervais is known as the poet laureate of comedic discomfort -- England's answer to Larry David. Cringe-inducing embarrassment is his metier, and he's shown it off to fine effect first in the original "The Office" and later in the HBO series "Extras," which examines one of Gervais' pet bugaboos: the unexamined quest for fame. Gervais plays striving Andy Millman, who starts out as an extra and unexpectedly achieves stardom as the lead in an embarrassing sitcom. "Extras" has already won several awards, and Gervais is up for five Emmys on Sunday.

Cheekily cutting

Promotion doesn't seem a natural fit for Gervais, though he's a great talker. In fact, he is a great guest on talk shows except for the problem that he doesn't really like to do them because, as he says, he's "not in control of the idea." In person, Gervais evinces an idiosyncratic mixture of astringency and empathy. Dressed in an orange T-shirt and jeans, he's a roly-poly Englishman with a cheeky schoolboy grin, offering cutting pronouncements about a range of human foibles, including his own.