DETROIT — Paul Walter Hauser considers himself spoiled.

Perhaps for good reason. The Emmy-winning Saginaw-raised actor is currently in the No. 1 movie in the country, "The Fantastic Four: First Steps," and he co-stars opposite Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in this weekend's "The Naked Gun," the hilarious reboot of the classic 1988 slapstick comedy.

In mid-August he's starring in the crime thriller "Americana" alongside Sydney Sweeney, and later this year he'll appear in "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere," the buzzworthy biopic of Bruce Springsteen, in which he plays the recording engineer with whom Springsteen (played by "The Bear's" Jeremy Allen White) recorded "Nebraska."

"I'm spoiled rotten," says Hauser, on a Zoom call last month to talk about "The Naked Gun." "Look at my resume, look at my family. I feel like the luckiest man in the world."

Hauser — who earlier this year starred in "The Luckiest Man in America," the true story about the "Press Your Luck" contestant who figured out the game board's pattern and took the show for $110,000 — just welcomed a daughter with his wife, Amy Boland Hauser, last month. The couple also has two sons, ages 3 and 2.

He says his outward gratitude stems, in part, from his sobriety. The 38-year-old celebrated three years of being sober in October 2024.

"It's not enough to just assume you embody gratitude; it does help to write a list and look at the things around you," says Hauser. "With the headlines the way they are in our global society today and how fractured and broken everything is, it's really nice to be able to come back and go, wow, a stylist picked out my outfit, a screenwriter gave me words to say that are brilliant, my wife supports me, my children are awesome, I worked with Liam Neeson and Clint Eastwood and Tim Robinson. Life is stupid good."

Life has been stupid good for Hauser since he broke out in 2017's "I, Tonya." Since then, he's become one of Hollywood's go-to guys for playing lovable losers, starring in Eastwood's 2019 "Richard Jewell," about the 1996 Olympic bombing suspect, and playing a henchman in 2021's "Cruella."

He's also made a pair of movies with Spike Lee, he picked up an Emmy for his role as a serial killer in "Black Bird," he had a recurring role in the "Karate Kid" update "Cobra Kai," and he made a memorable appearance as an amateur actor in a beloved sketch on Robinson's "I Think You Should Leave."

Tony Tost, the writer-director of "Americana," says Hauser first caught his eye in "Richard Jewell," for which he was "robbed of an Oscar," Tost says. He then realized he was also great in comedic roles, and he calls the actor's skill set "extraordinary."

"He has a gift for revealing his inner life when he's inhabiting a character to the camera. There's not this wall that's put up, he's not performing for the camera, he's revealing himself to the camera," says Tost. "He has this everyman quality, I think you just kind of innately connect with him, because he does open himself up to you."

Tost says Hauser was "the beating heart" of the "Americana" set, and says he brought with him "an energy and a genuine joy that is really hard to replace."

"I don't see any reason why he doesn't have a Philip Seymour Hoffman- or John Goodman-type of career, where he alternates between coming in and stealing scenes and also carrying entire movies on his back. He's uniquely positioned to do both," says Tost. "In my ideal world, I'd love to do a half-dozen movies with him."

Getting 'Naked'

Hauser says he grew up knowing the original "Naked Gun" as a curious box on the video store shelf.

"Just like most kids growing up, you'd see it at the video store, you'd see this white haired man who looked goofy playing cop, and you're like, 'What is that?'" he says. "Around the age of 8 or 9, I started getting introduced to more adult comedy stuff, like 'Mystery Science Theater 3000,' 'Airplane,' 'Naked Gun,' 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' and I started to discover high-brow people doing low-brow humor. And I just loved it, I fell in love with it."

Part of the appeal, Hauser says, was seeing his father, a now-retired Lutheran pastor in Saginaw, laugh at the barrage of jokes packed in the movie, spitting out like machine-gun fire.

"My dad was a pretty serious guy, so it's fun to get to laugh with your dad or with your relatives," he says. "This movie plays like a childhood relic for a lot of people like me."

Hauser got the call for the new "Naked Gun," which is directed by the Lonely Island's Akiva Schaffer, a few weeks before shooting began in Atlanta in spring 2024.

"It was very short notice, like 10 to 15 days before they started, and I got a phone call that said, 'Hey, they want you to play Liam Neeson's partner.' And to me, it was a no-brainer," Hauser says. "I really didn't even need to read the script. I was just ready to say yes."

The joke-a-minute comedy finds Neeson's Lt. Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the character played in the original by Leslie Nielsen, taking down a villain with the assistance of Hauser's Capt. Ed Hocken Jr., the son of the original's George Kennedy. Pamela Anderson plays Neeson's love interest, and the movie pays homage to the original by packing nonstop jokes, sight gags and pratfalls into the movie's tight 85-minute running time.

In one scene where Drebin is being celebrated, Hauser's character puts his fingers in his mouth to whistle. Hauser can't actually whistle through his fingers, and the resulting high-pitched phwee! you hear in the final product is 100% movie magic, he says.

"I have no clue how people do that," he says with a laugh. "But that was my idea. I said, 'I'm going to do this,' and I did it. And one of the crew members was like, 'Nothing came out, we didn't hear anything,' and I'm like, 'Yeah, they can do it in post-, it's OK.'"

In-ring action

Not movie magic is Hauser's real-life quest for wrestling gold. He's taken his lifelong love of professional wrestling and become a pro wrestler himself, doing stints with Major League Wrestling and PROGRESS Wrestling, and he's even got his own wrestling action figure.

But he's not letting his love for in-ring storytelling supplant his acting career.

"It'll always come secondary, it will always be tertiary to acting, producing, writing, directing. But it's not a side quest, it's definitely a real quest," he says.

"It's just a marathon; it takes a while to materialize. Some wrestling fans have been unkind and said things like, 'His 15 minutes of fame are up, man!' It's like, you have no idea. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon," he says. "I'm going to be a major player in the professional wrestling world for a long time. And it has as much to do with behind the scenes, if not more, than it does with me being in the ring, which folks will find out as the chronology unfolds."

Pro wrestling fans haven't been the only ones giving Hauser grief online, and he's had an up-and-down relationship with social media. He's gone through several cycles of joining, quitting and rejoining X — he's currently off the platform — but he's doing mostly OK on Instagram these days, he says.

It's something he continues to work through.

"I think the best summation I can give is that I've learned that the collective social media experience is that you sometimes assume people are playing with some rules of decency, and then when you show up with a karate hand, they show up with a blowtorch and a grenade," he says. "You go, 'I thought we were just kind of sparring here,' but (they) want to kill a lot of people. It's literally that kind of mentality of realizing, like, you're not outmatched intellectually, but you're outmatched by people's rage or ill intent, and so there's no point in overextending yourself and your ideology."

Hauser says he enjoys using social media for the promotion of his projects, and also for calling out what he sees are injustices in the world. Because even if he's been spoiled rotten by life, the mini-fires he starts online are worth whatever detriment they bring to his career, he says.

"It won't stop me from posting about Trump incessantly. I will still do that with no regard to my career standing," says Hauser. "Because there's a difference between naughtiness and evil. I'm naughty every day of my life. But I don't put up with evil, I call it out."

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