Before Ghosts star Brandon Scott Jones was an actor, he played competitive tennis. But he never made it to the pros, possibly because he’s just too much of a team player. “I was taking the court sometimes and rooting for my opponent, because these were my friends as well. And the thought of competing against them just didn’t sit well with me,” he says during a recent Zoom call. “I didn’t have the ruthless factor—and that was the problem.”

The same quality that kept Jones off the Challenger circuit may be responsible for his Hollywood breakthrough. Ghosts, which recently wrapped its third season on CBS, follows Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar), a couple running a struggling B&B in a Hudson Valley mansion that just happens to be crawling with the titular spirits. (Sam can see and speak with them; Jay can’t.) The series is a throwback in more ways than one: It’s a genial hangout comedy, a serialized saga that runs for around 20 episodes a season (at least when those seasons aren’t shortened by strikes), and a bona fide network-television hit.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s a true ensemble effort—the kind of show where every actor is gunning not only to land punch lines, but to set them up so their costars look good. And nobody is better at either than Jones, who plays the ghost of a pompous Revolutionary War captain named Isaac Higgintoot.

Isaac has an inflated sense of his own importance and the power to make living people smell phantom farts. In less deft hands, he easily could have been a one- or maybe two-joke character. But in Jones’s, he’s equal parts silly and soulful, wringing belly laughs out of even the goofiest, sitcommiest premises (this past season, for reasons we don’t need to get into, Isaac became childishly obsessed with dinosaurs) and pathos from the character’s deep-seated insecurity.

It’s a part that seems as if it had been written for Jones, who’s stolen scenes on many of the most beloved comedies of the last 10 years—bit parts on Girls and Broad City, an arc as a Perez Hilton-inspired gossip blogger on The Good Place, a key supporting role on The Other Two. But Jones didn’t feel that way when he first auditioned for the role. “I think I even called my managers at the time and I was like, ‘I don’t think this went well,’” he remembers. “I went over to the Taco Bell across the street from the casting office, and I ate my feelings.”

Funny as he is, Jones seems very much a creature of the new millennium; to quote a viral tweet, he has the face of someone who knows what an iPhone is. The actor was understandably nervous that the show’s casting director wouldn’t see him as an 18th-century soldier. He could, however, lean into the script’s hints about Isaac’s queer sexuality—something that the character himself had been repressing for 200-plus years.

And as it turns out, that’s what really makes Isaac tick. “This is a man who, when he was alive, felt like he couldn’t be any version of the person that he actually is,” Jones says. “When you do that, it does become a part of you. So especially anything emotional, Isaac swallows it a little bit. Anytime that he gets very excited, he can get wild and flamboyant—but I always try to temper it with some element where he’s pulling back. Because even if he’s not consciously doing it, it’s something that’s going to naturally happen for him. And that is a weird little connection that I have to him.”

It’s not the only one. One of the longest-running jokes on Ghosts is Isaac’s one-sided rivalry with Alexander Hamilton, a colonial-era peer whose fame vastly outstrips Isaac’s own. Curtis, whom Jones played on The Other Two, also spent most of that series as a frustrated striver—an often out-of-work actor who rooted for the success of his friend Cary (Drew Tarver), only to find that Cary was incapable of extending the same courtesy to Curtis.

That part obviously hit even closer to home for Jones. As a college student in New York in the aughts, he fell in love with improv and began studying at the storied Upright Citizens Brigade theater—a comedy crucible that helped launch the careers of countless boldface names, including Donald Glover, Aubrey Plaza, and Nick Kroll. That’s where Jones got to know future Saturday Night Live head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, as well as his future Good Place costar D’Arcy Carden. He has fond memories of running into Kate McKinnon backstage before one of his shows, watching her pack up her wigs after her own performance.

In those days, his friends were booking sitcoms and SNL while Jones balanced auditions with day jobs. “I think it’s easy to fall into a little bit of envy every now and then where you’re like, ‘Wait a second, am I going to be the guy that’s left behind?’” he says.

But unlike Cary on The Other Two—who’s nearly destroyed by professional jealousy and a pathological inability to be satisfied with what he has—Jones found a way to spin those feelings into something positive. “It’s not necessarily bad to say that you want what somebody else has,” he says. “I think it’s okay to want things, and it’s okay to want success, as long as you’re not trying to prevent anybody else from having it.” To root for your perceived opponents, and understand that a rising tide can raise all boats. After leaving SNL, Kelly and Schneider created The Other Two; when the original Curtis dropped out of the pilot the day it was supposed to shoot, they asked Jones to play the role instead.

Now Jones is firmly on the other side, ensconced in a reliable acting job—Ghosts was picked up for a fourth season before the third had aired its finale—that also gives him time to work on writing projects on the side. (Just don’t expect him to take a seat in the writers room on Ghosts, as he did on the second season of The Other Two: “It’s freeing to get to explore a character from only the performance side. I also don’t know if they would want me.”) He’s speculating excitedly about the comedy royalty Ghosts might bring on to play Patience, a feral Puritan ghost introduced in season three’s finale who has a vendetta against Isaac: “Amy Sedaris, wouldn’t that be really cool? My God, Molly Shannon. Cheri Oteri! Ana Gasteyer!”

And he’s very happy to be a regular on a show that millions of people are actually watching. Though like many industry insiders with a background in legit comedy—you know, the kind that has jokes—he’ll admit to being a bit bewildered about how dark most shows the TV Academy qualifies as “comedies” are. “I’m trying to answer this as diplomatically as possible,” he says. “I don’t know if it frustrates me so much as it just confounds me. I do love those shows. But if I put them on, I don’t put them on to laugh. How about that?”

It’s the only time in our conversation that he gets even close to sounding unsupportive, and only because I goad him into it. Jones is clearly content with the state of his career; he’s glad to stay on Ghosts as long as the show will have him, whether it ends with season four or enjoys a Big Bang Theory–esque, decade-plus run. “It’s hard to look that far ahead,” he says, “because there’s also a part of me that’s like, I’m so lucky to have a job. The thought of not wanting to have it feels wild to me. But I don’t know—maybe ask me in two years, and we’ll see.”