In a scene from the most recent season of the Netflix series “Girls5eva,” character actor Richard Kind appears as a sort of guardian angel for one of the heroines, a member of a pop girl group. His advice to her: Don’t try to make it big. The middle is where you want to be.“I’ve spent the past 40 years striking the perfect balance between constantly working and never getting bugged in a deli,” he says.

That’s not exactly true. During a recent lunch at not a deli but an upscale Mediterranean restaurant in New York’s Manhattan borough, a woman walked up and recalled something she had seen him in — a play in the Hamptons; she didn’t remember which one — and asked what he was doing next. He told her he was in the new season of the Hulu mystery comedy “Only Murders in the Building.”

He said this kind of thing happens all the time. Beloved by some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Kind himself is down-to-earth and approachable. Sitting at a table trying to scoop the last bit of fruit out of his raspberry lemonade, he could have been any other hardworking New Yorker who would never let a quality bite go to waste. But his face, with its hangdog expressions, and his aggressively nasal voice were unmistakable.

Put another way, he is a consummate everyman who is also, if you can pardon the expression, one of a kind. He specializes in the kinds of dads or colleagues many of us know well — boisterous, sometimes desperate men who are quick to anger and even quicker to flop-sweat. Off screen, he has a workaday approach to his job that belies the glamour of his profession, and he talks often about the hardships of being a working actor even though he is constantly on television.

“People say ‘What was your big break?’ ” said Kind, 67. “I still haven’t had one. I just work.”

But his distinctiveness as a performer is such that people he works with say that once you think of him for a role, you can’t think of anyone else. He is almost always fundamentally himself on screen, but he can make that self pitiful or menacing, lovable or terrifying.

“He’s like this Macy’s balloon run amok slamming into buildings in New York,” said his friend Michael J. Fox, who was a co-star on the series “Spin City.” “He’s if Zero Mostel ate Jack Benny ate Jerry Lewis — crazy, over-the-top, but there’s an elegance about him.”

If you’ve watched movies or television at any point in the past 35 years, you’ve probably seen Kind. He has close to 300 acting credits on IMDb, so many that sometimes he sees roles there that he doesn’t remember. He spent six seasons on “Spin City” and was a frequent presence on “Mad About You” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He made viewers panic in the Coen brothers’ film “A Serious Man” and he made them cry as Bing Bong in Pixar’s “Inside Out.” He has performed in stage musicals and in surrealistic horror, with Stephen Sondheim and with Ari Aster.

This year has been a busy one, even for him. In May, he was John Mulaney’s sidekick during the talk show experiment “Everybody’s in L.A.,” playing a sort of absurdist Ed McMahon. He recently had a stint on the Paramount+ drama “Evil” as a judge, and in the fourth season of “Only Murders,” he arrives as a murder suspect whom Steve Martin’s character calls Stink-Eye Joe but whose real name is Vince Fish.

Fox and various internet wags want him to play Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the vice presidential candidate, on “Saturday Night Live.”

“His career is insane,” George Clooney, a close friend, wrote in an email. “He would bounce from hosting the Christmas parade to starring on Broadway to starring in a Coen brothers film to being the sidekick on a talk show. He’s great at comedy and honestly even better at drama.”

(Kind said: “My joke is, on my resume under special skills, I have ‘George Clooney’s friend.’ ”)

Even though Kind is best known for being funny, he approaches that task with seriousness.

“He’s the most prepared, lovely guy,” said John Hoffman, the showrunner of “Only Murders,” adding that Kind is intensely self- critical. When Kind messed up a line during filming, “he would just berate himself terribly.”

Kind is frequently the most proud of his stage roles, and he mentioned a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York. But he said he wasn’t doing much theater lately.

“A regular TV show lets you do theater,” he said. (He is still frustrated over the cancellation of “East New York,” a CBS police procedural he was on that premiered in 2022 and lasted one season.)

Kind said he would happily play a different role every week. But in his personal life, he is very much the opposite.

“For a liberal man, I’m very conservative,” he said. “I don’t like change.”

If Kind had followed his father’s chosen path for his son, he would have taken over the family jewelry store in Princeton, New Jersey, a short drive from Yardley, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.

At Northwestern University in Illinois, Kind tried acting as an extracurricular but planned to go eventually to law school. One of his teachers, a Chicago theater fixture named Frank Galati, told him that if he ever went into the business, he wouldn’t work for 10 years because “ ‘Hollywood doesn’t want you — you’re not a pretty face.’ ” Galati predicted that he would come into his own around age 32 or 33.

Kind decided to give it a shot anyway. After a stint at Second City in Chicago, he moved to Los Angeles in his early 30s. It was as Galati predicted: He booked series after series, including the pilot “Bennett Brothers,” where he met Clooney, and the Carol Burnett anthology “Carol & Company.”

Kind doesn’t have to audition much these days, but he has been in the business long enough to know that when a producer tells him on a golf course that he wants to cast him, as Dan Fogelman of “Only Murders” did, it’s hardly ironclad.

This time, a role was actually in the cards. Hoffman, who created the show with Martin, said had Kind in mind while writing Vince, a man who has “antibiotic-resistant pink eye.”

When Kind was young, he wanted to be famous. He no longer has that desire, even after having watched some of his friends ascend to the heights of Hollywood. He described his career as being like a “river,” which has narrowed and widened with the vicissitudes of his vocation.

“And then you find out your career,” he said, “has become an ocean.”