When it came time to start his own career, he tried to eschew the help of his famous family. He considered changing his last name but couldn't figure out what his new one would be, and he declined when his dad offered to let him use his agent. "I knew that people would constantly say, 'Oh, I know how he got that job,'" he says as we wait for our food at Eva's. "And they're still going to say that. It's fine. But as long as I knew how I got there, that would be enough." In one of his first auditions, he remembered that a casting director was shocked that he was "actually really good." Her expectation was that he was just another nepotism case. A kid with some of the most famous parents on Earth would phone it in, assume the part was his by default, and "be a real asshole."

Jack Quaid is not an asshole, as basically anyone who works with him can attest. "The thing that I’m really always taken with is how unbelievably down-to-earth that kid is," The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke says. "He shouldn't be." His Scream team agrees. "He's one of those people that when you talk to him for five minutes, you're like, 'I just want to give this guy a hug,'" says Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, one of the co-directors of the newest Scream. That good-guy demeanor actually worked against him when Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett were trying to cast him as a maniacal killer who would ultimately don the Ghostface mask. "A lot of people were not convinced that Jack had that gear," Bettinelli-Olpin says. "When he was auditioning, we got some pushback, and we had to point-blank ask, 'Hey, would you just do a read where you're just fucking evil? Just go full-tilt evil because you just need to prove to people that you can.' And Jack just fucking hit it out of the park. I mean, he was terrifying, genuinely terrifying."

This ability to tap into a darkness behind his jovial facade has served Quaid well on The Boys, where every character is easily corruptible. Quaid was Kripke's first choice for Hughie, a "John Cusack" type who, in the comics, was based on Simon Pegg. (Pegg now plays Hughie's dad.) Even though Kripke knew Quaid was perfect after seeing him opposite Glenn Close in a pilot for a quirky zombie show that Amazon never picked up, the studio wanted to consider more options. But Kripke always came back to Quaid. "I think it's his lightness that makes his darkness interesting. It's because it comes out of him so unexpectedly," Kripke says. "If he's going to punch the wall as Hughie, he's going to bruise his hand. He goes for it. Seeing somebody who shouldn't be freaking out at that level freaking out is unsettling to people."

Quaid was a little hesitant to lean into Hughie's third-season turn, where his desire to "save" his superpowered girlfriend Starlight (Erin Moriarty) leads to him going against her wishes and shooting up with supe juice, despite the fact it makes him vomit a green substance. In his quest to be a hero, he becomes toxic masculinity personified. "It's interesting because he wants to save her, but I don't know if he really believes that," Quaid says. "I think ultimately he just wants to feel better about himself and feel powerful because he is a character that never feels like he is powerful." At the same time, Quaid was also thrilled to be able to have powers that resembled one of his favorite X-Men, Nightcrawler, the teleporting beast mutant, even if that meant stripping down. "If I have to be naked to have Nightcrawler powers, I'll do it," he says.