I really don’t know why he’s taken to chatting with me. Honestly I don’t. As a co-worker has pointed out to me, there are few people who share less in common with Jack Nicholson than I. And yet for the second time in four months I spent an hour on the phone last night chatting with perhaps the most famous actor in the world.

Last night we chatted mostly about politics (in November it was “Chinatown” and “Batman” respectively in a two-part chat). Surely you’ve seen his campaign ad for Hillary Clinton by now. So it was me at my desk in mid-town Manhattan, posters of “The Last Mimzy” and “Bratz” hanging over me, and Jack was where? I’m guessing his feet were up. He was in plush robe of some sort. Maybe he was sipping some whiskey. Neat of course. Bob Evans was probably in a cabana out back. Me, I had a box of Krusty O’s next to me.

What’s Jack like to talk to? I’ve been asked that a bunch already and I expect I’ll be sharing these anecdotes for years to come. He’s as advertised. Cocky, self-satisfied, clearly at peace with his place in the world. He is ,without a doubt, whip smart. But his answers can be long and windy. They don’t always make sense when you’re first hearing them and sometimes not even when you think about them later. He’s speaking in the language of Jack and you’re just trying to keep up. He’ll reference a 30 plus year old interview Jann Wenner did or something Mr. Huston said to him once (that’s John Huston of course.)

He makes a point of using your name a lot — the mark of a smart interview subject. He asks you questions. “Do you have a horse in this race, Josh?” he asked me. I realize he does these so-called interviews infrequently enough that he can treat them as actual conversations and not as one-sided talk-show anecdotes. And he really seems to enjoy the dialogue. Around 35 minutes into our talk last night I apologized for taking up so much of his time (I said this as someone used to the seven-minute interview slot at a junket). Without missing a beat he laughed and said “Ask away, baby. I’ve got nowhere to be.”