Style

Is Jason Bateman as sharp and sarcastic in real life as he is onscreen?

Joel Stein prays that the former child star won't let him down as they roll through L.A. buying scented candles, hitting the car wash, and exploring the intricacies of the Jason B. hand roll.

Never meet the people you admire.

You've projected so much onto them that they can't help but let you down. Sure, John Cusack was nice, in a smooth, spacey, stoner kind of way, but he was no John Cusack. And Willie Randolph was cool, but he wasn't the soft-spoken brainiac baseball player I'd been having imaginary conversations with since I was 6. In the two semi-opportunities I had, I avoided David Letterman.

I randomly met Jason Bateman six days before I was assigned this article, at the Governors Ball after the Oscars. We were standing next to each other, and I broke my own rule and told him I thought his was the only character I really believed in Juno, the movie in which he plays a guy who hits on a pregnant teenager whose baby he and his wife are supposed to adopt.

"That's because you're a pig," he told me. It was exactly the quick-witted condescension I'd fallen for since Silver Spoons.

But a long interview for a cover story? That was destined for disappointment. So Bateman, knowing he couldn't deliver, decided to dissuade me from my man crush on purpose. We were going to spend seven hours running his boring-ass errands until every one of my illusions was dispelled. I was not looking forward to this.

He picks me up at 10 a.m. at my house in Los Angeles to go walk his dogs—a French bulldog and a Brussels griffon—on a hike at Runyon Canyon. After meeting a contractor working on my house, he immediately asks, "How long have you and Daniel been together?" Before we reach the first traffic light, he makes an AIDS joke. As we get out of the car, he runs into the wife of his friend, actor Robert Patrick. "He looks good," Bateman says about Patrick. "Is he back on the pipe?"

This is why, as a kid, I liked Bateman more than any other child star. Because Bateman always played a dick. Not a teen-villain dick, but the kind who you wanted to be: the smart, cocky, friendly dick. Kirk Cameron and Ricky Schroder could do snarky, and Scott Baio could do arrogant, but underneath was a desperation to be liked, to wink at the joke, to make sure viewers knew they really were good people. But Bateman never paused for laughter. His appeal has always come from the fact that he's a little more honest, a little more flawed, a little more courageous, and a lot quicker than you are. It comes out in the dick con-artist teen in the 1980s sitcom It's Your Move, the dick sportscaster in Dodgeball, the dick coke dealer in Starsky & Hutch, the dick perv attorney in Smokin' Aces. Sure, in the first season of Arrested Development, he was the good son coming back to save the family business, but by season two he was a dick, calling his mom a slut and refusing to acknowledge his son's girlfriend.