TORONTO—If Jason Bateman seems particularly at home in his newest feature, This Is Where I Leave You, that’s probably because he is. Bateman plays Judd Altman, the sane middle brother in a dysfunctional family with an absentee wife who’s forced back to his childhood home when his father is removed from the picture.

Yes, there are details that separate this plot from the story of Arrested Development (his absent wife didn’t die, she left him, and his father doesn’t get jailed, he dies), but Bateman has gone down this path before.

Asked what draws him to roles like these, the 45-year old pulls no punches. “Well, employment, really,” Bateman says, in a Toronto hotel room, with the dry but affable delivery that he perfected on Development and in films like Horrible Bosses and Juno. “You kind of take what you get in this business, unless you’re two or three actors that we all know. And if the part is something that you can tackle and there’s a bunch of really great people attached to it, it’s a pretty easy yes. I get approached to play this type of character often, because that’s what people see me do, so it’s no surprise to me.”

Sitting beside him, his costar Tina Fey can’t help but chime in on the question. “When you need someone to be the emotional centre of something, there’s an intelligence they have to project, a warmth, and a likability, for the audience to identify with them…”

There’s a pause, before both actors rush for the punch line like it’s their born-and-bred instinct.

“And those guys were unavailable,” jokes Bateman.

“And Jason has two of those,” snipes Fey.

All jokes aside, Bateman, who first came to fame at a young age on TV shows like Little House on the Prairie and Silver Spoons, knows the business extremely well and understands that locking down solid roles is important. Having been in the industry all of his life, he also acknowledges the ups and downs of Hollywood. The ups? Fame, money, being the lead in a film with legends like Jane Fonda and up-and-coming stars like Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, and Corey Stoll.

The downs? Well, Bateman realizes the pressure of always having to be on your game, knowing there could be a camera around any corner. “That’s always tough when you’re out just being goofy with your kids,” he says, “and there might be a photographer or somebody coming by and saying hi and your kid’s in the middle of crying about something and that’s embarrassing them and they want to be in private.” But through a career that’s spanned four decades, he hasn’t had any real problems, he says, even as his family has come under the microscope. “So you don’t want to be a burden in that sense, and perhaps that’ll be the case, but so far so good.”

And though this latest role has its similarities to Bateman’s Development character, Michael Bluth, it also has its differences, the biggest being the media that they appear in. At the risk of spoiling anything, it doesn’t look like there’ll be a This Is Where I Leave You 2 (getting this cast together again would be quite a task anyway), so Bateman can leave Judd Altman behind and not have to worry about, say, a Netflix reboot.

“Yeah, there’s also something that’s kind of great about that too, because it’s not a growing document like a series is,” explains Bateman. “In a series, you start to dig and play a certain emotion and then the writers will say, ‘Oh, well, he or she plays jealous really well,’ and an episode becomes that down the line. And with this one, they start a certain way and end a certain way, and you know what colour you need to play to make the whole thing work. And that’s pretty cool because everyone is working on the same document and everyone knows what the map is.”