In 2009, Chris O’Dowd bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. Back then, he was known as the dishevelled, 6ft 4in star of The IT Crowd, playing work-shy Roy “Have you tried turning it on and off again?” Trenneman. On the cusp of 30, he’d just been told that, after three series of the Channel 4 sitcom, the show’s budget was being slashed. There was a threat that the next run would be cut down from six to four episodes. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, if I’m in a really big show on TV, and I can’t really pay my rent with what that would pay, then this isn’t a system that’s sustainable for me,’” he says, sipping from a bottle of fizzy water. Just as well, then, that the flight to America changed his life. He met his future wife there. And backstage at a Louis CK gig, he bumped into slacker-comedy king Judd Apatow. O’Dowd went on to star in three of the director’s Noughties comedies – Bridesmaids, This Is 40 and Juliet, Naked – as well as Lena Dunham’s Girls, which Apatow produced. Since then, O’Dowd has appeared in more than 30 other films and TV shows – often as men in arrested development – winning a couple of Emmys and establishing himself as one of the most in-demand Irish actors in Hollywood.