When one reads various interviews with Martin Freeman over the years, one thing immediately becomes apparent: being thought of as “the nice guy” is Freeman’s single biggest pet peeve. It doesn’t sound like an insult at first, but the constant barrage of “nice guy”/“everyman”/“just playing himself” comments over the years have piled up. The responses he gives from the early to mid-2000s feature tons of swearing, as if he’s trying to show what a nice guy he is not; in the late 2000s he cuts back on the crudeness (perhaps fatherhood mellowed that side of him) but snaps if one tries to broach his private life; and more recent interviews are a mix of the two, with him remaining staunchly close-lipped on the nature of his relationship with his partner Amanda Abbington (Mary Watson on Sherlock) while losing his mind if the interviewer refers to him as an everyman.

But given the sheer range in his performances over the years, plumbing the depths of joy and sadness — no other actor can manage the stilted, stuttering flurry of emotion that Freeman has accomplished on more than one occasion on Sherlock — one can’t exactly blame him. While Cumberbatch was the choice for Sherlock all along, it took Freeman in the role of John for the creators to know they had a magical combination on their hands.

Freeman was born in Aldershot on September 8, 1971, the youngest of five children after Benedict, Laura, Jamie, and Tim. His parents, Geoffrey and Philomena, divorced when he was still a toddler, and Martin went to live with his father, a naval officer. His dad died suddenly of a heart attack when Martin was 10, and the boy returned to live with his mother. “My dad’s death was no picnic,” he says, “but, when I was younger, I was hell-bent on not looking bothered by it.” A quiet child who suffered from asthma and what he calls a “dodgy leg,” Freeman was nonetheless athletic, playing football and squash; he played on the British national squash squad between the ages of 9 and 14.

Though he joined a theater troupe at age 15, he didn’t decide to become an actor until two years later. “When I was 17, I acted in a play called The Roses of Eyam, about a Derbyshire village during the Great Plague of 1666. I remember thinking I was doing quite well. It was the first time I got a lot of really positive feedback for my acting — the first time I had real confidence in myself. Acting, for me, feels like an absolute expression — a really necessary one.” He attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, and after graduation it wasn’t long before he was getting roles in both television and film. The most important role was in the TV movie Men Only, where he met Amanda Abbington.

His big break came in 2001 when he was cast as Tim Canterbury on Ricky Gervais’s groundbreaking comedy The Office. Soon viewers all over the U.K. — and across the ocean — were swooning over Tim and Dawn, watching Freeman’s trademark reactions to the antics of David Brent, Gareth, and “Big Keith.” Overnight he went from a character actor to an instantly recognizable star, but being readily identified with one specific part had a major disadvantage: the nice-guy typecasting. Before Tim, Martin could play businessmen, rapists, pimps, even a beat-boxing thug in Ali G Indahouse. But now, for all intents and purposes, in the public imagination, he was Tim Canterbury, all-round nice guy. The series wrapped in 2003, and he was already starting to get sick of it.

“When people call me an everyman they think it’s a compliment,” he told the London Evening Standard. “I want to rip their f****** eyeballs out.” As his fame grew from taking parts like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, the you’re-just-playing-yourself misperception grew as well.

“Well, no I’m not,” he told the Guardian in 2009. “If you mean I look a bit like him and I sound a bit like him — yeah, that’s because I’m playing him and it didn’t say ‘He’s Somalian’ on the script, otherwise I would have tried an accent. If the script says, ‘Guy in his 30s, my generation, lives in England,’ what am I going to do? Start acting like I’m half-lizard? There’s no point, because no one wants to see it.”

In 2014, when he was cast in the brilliant television series Fargo playing the unfortunate Lester Nygaard, he was faced with the question once again. “I don’t think other actors are asked all the time about the similarities between their roles,” he said. “I don’t think Ben [Cumberbatch] or Daniel Craig are asked that. I think it stems from my so-called perceived approachability … I’m a good actor; I can pretend.”

Dear journalists: please stop asking him this question.

After The Office, Freeman gave a critically acclaimed performance in Love Actually as a stand-in body double who’s shyly trying to ask the actress he’s fake-banging on film out on a date. He also appeared in the first two movies in Simon Pegg’s Cornetto Trilogy — Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz — and starred in the final one, The World’s End (which may have been an inspiration for John Watson’s stag night on Sherlock). He’s won a BAFTA and an Emmy for his role as John Watson, as well an Emmy nom for Fargo, and his lead role in The Hobbit has made him an international superstar.

Benedict Cumberbatch, for one, is very aware of Freeman’s astonishing talents. “He’s extraordinary,” he says. “I honestly felt myself get better as an actor playing scenes opposite him — he has a brilliant level of humanity. We all know how funny he can be from his work on The Office, but he can also play so much pathos — it’s an unsung talent of his that’s often clouded by his Office fame.”

One thing that drew Freeman to Sherlock was that he saw it as the perfect mix of comedy and drama, which is usually a marker of the best shows. “There is great comedy in The Sopranos,” he says, “and there is great pathos in Laurel and Hardy. I think because, with comedy, the reason I like doing [Sherlock], it’s not a new toy for me where I really want to flex that muscle and be funny. There are great funny moments in Sherlock but my instinct, especially because people think I am funny, is to always play against it and get rid of laughs. I like being straight. I want variation. I want to have my cake and eat it. Even in The Office, which I think is extremely funny, I was playing the straight man. Ricky Gervais’s David Brent gets most of the quotes. I don’t believe in hogging — the story has to be in charge.”

As his fame grew, Freeman, like his Sherlock co-star, valued his personal life even more. He and Abbington have two children, and when he tired of fans ringing his North London doorbell at all hours hoping “Tim” would open the door, the two of them moved out of the city. Despite being offered bigger and bigger roles, he often hesitates if he thinks the job will take him away from his family for long periods of time. “My main priority in any job is when is the soonest I can get back to the three people I love most in the world,” he says. “I even ummed and ahhed over The Hobbit.” While he readily admits to being a grump, he’s also a very hands-on father when he’s at home. “It goes without saying that you’re going to love your kids, but what you’re not expecting is wanting to kill everybody in your house,” he jokes. “I’m fortunate in that Amanda is generally a slightly nicer person than I am. If it were purely up to me, my kids would probably be vegetarian Catholic Marxists.”

When the second season of Sherlock was airing, Freeman and Abbington joined Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss at Gatiss’s house to watch “The Hounds of Baskerville.” Afterwards they asked Abbington to come out to the kitchen to discuss the part of Mary. She thought they wanted her advice, and then they told her they wanted it to be her. “I probably got quite emotional at that point,” she says. But the opportunity to work with her husband, thus meaning more time together, was irresistible. “I think Martin and I bounce off each other very well. He is one of my favorite actors. He’s so easy to work with and so creative. He brings something different to every single take. He is so on top of his lines that he can dig down and find a different angle every time. That really keeps you on your toes. Both characters go on a wonderful journey, and to do that with Martin was such fun.”

Her main hope for the character was not to be a third wheel to Sherlock and John, but instead to complement their relationship. “Ben and Martin have real chemistry, and I had to hold my own in the scenes with them,” she says. “It was daunting — not necessarily to come between them, but to arrive as another dynamic.” As soon as Mary told John she liked Sherlock, the fans knew they’d have very little to worry about.

One of the first scenes they shot that season was where Sherlock revealed himself to John in the restaurant. “It was slightly surreal,” says Abbington, “because it did feel like he’d been away, and [John] hadn’t seen him. It was so charged, that scene. When John sees Sherlock for the first time, and then looks at Mary, it’s that look of ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now.’ Both Martin and Ben pitched it so beautifully, especially Martin. In that one look, you see those two years of hurt. It was heartbreaking.” 

While Freeman plays coy with the are-they-or-aren’t-they-married aspect of their real-life relationship, Abbington is clear that they aren’t, and that it was very strange to film the wedding episode of Sherlock when they hadn’t actually had one themselves. “Maybe one day we will,” she says. “It sometimes does [come up], ‘Should we do it?’ I think we will, eventually. Our children are saying now, ‘Mummy, you should get married.’ They know we’re not. Especially my son, who’s going, ‘Please, Mama, please be married.’ Maybe we’ll do it in Italy.”

A self-declared homebody who likes to stay in and listen to music or watch a movie on DVD with his family, Freeman is one of the cool kids who prefers the comforts of home to the wildness of international stardom. “Some people have that roar in their head, but I’m not sure I ever did,” he says. “That live-fast-die-young thing. No one wants it really — Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin — it’s not good. I want to live with Amanda till I’m 70.”