Jason Sudeikis has made his name in comedy, from his breakout work on Saturday Night Live to his roles in the Horrible Bosses movies and other comic films like We're the Millers and Hall Pass. So fans might be surprised to see him playing it straight in Race, the true story of Olympian Jesse Owens' historic journey to winning multiple gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Summer Olympics. Sudeikis stars as Larry Snyder, Owens' long-suffering coach at The Ohio State University and eventually the Olympics. 

Myspace chatted with Sudeikis about the new film, playing a serious role, and his disappointment about Joe Biden not running for president. 

How has the promotional tour for this been going? 

It's been cool to hear people's feedback about the film, and then obviously there's a very different quality and value to the questions than I've been asked when murdering bosses and smoking weed and hall-passing. 

What happens if it's the same quality of questions, but about racism? 

Yeah, people still looking for joke answers. [laughs] It's probably not the climate we're looking for in this day and age. 

Speaking of humor, I think the first time I heard of Jesse Owens was while watching Blazing Saddles as a kid. 

Yeah, I have a lot of movies like that. Like Johnny Dangerously I watched a ton, and I saw it again in the last five years and was like, "Wow, this movie has a lot of filth in it, and I didn't get any of it." 

It's amazing his story hasn't been told in film before. 

Everything in the script was remarkable to me, and it echoed throughout the entire process of making the film—"How has this story never been told?" Here we are 80 years later, and it was prescient and relevant to me before even saying yes to the film. One of the reasons I liked it was because of how much it spoke to the situation in the Russian Olympics in regard to the discrimination against homosexuals and the decision of whether to boycott. There's no way we could've anticipated at the release of the film how relevant it would be. But yeah, it was just one thing after another. And getting to actually be in Berlin, it was like the greatest field trip I'd ever imagined. 

Socially, we've come a long way from Owens' day, but it sometimes feels like in the last few years there's been some back-sliding.

I would say yes, yeah. Certainly it coincides with the national bulletin board we now have known as the Internet. Letters of discontent were sent to SNL for many, many years and Lorne [Michaels] used to proudly have them up on a bulletin board. People still do write letters, but now criticisms are able to be retweeted and forwarded, and there's a lot of blank space out there on the Internet and 24-hour news cycles and entertainment channels that need to be filled. It's almost like when a bone breaks. Like the bone is broken right now and when it heals it's stronger? That's where my optimism lies.

You're right, there is a lot of Internet to fill up each day. 

It can't be all porn. [laughs] 

Do you see this as a sort of turning point career-wise, going for more dramatic work in film instead of comedy? Is it a strategy? 

I appreciate the idea of a manipulation that I could ever orchestrate in that regard. [laughs] No, this was a story that was presented to me that I responded to immediately. It was just doing the job and making each scene as believable as any scene I try to do—within the different tone and different genre, obviously—in Horrible Bosses or We're the Millers or any sketch on SNL, really. It's just about making the connection between me and the fellow actors and making it believable. It's no different, the way I'm personally going about it. And I think what it does—not being too Pollyanna about the business of show at this point in my life—is it allows people who may not have actively seen me do something like this the opportunity to see me do something like this, which then expands their view of me, and then maybe the box that they have me in gets a little bit bigger. I understand that. 

Those boxes can be tough. 

Really, yeah. I mean, I'm proud to have the background I have, from the groups I've worked with in Kansas City to my Chicago experience with Second City and then SNL, obviously, but I know that with that comes a certain prejudice, a pre-existing notion of who I am and what I want and how managers and agents would want to represent me and how casting directors would want to cast me. It all makes sense to me, I understand it, but I also know—as you probably know about your own self—is we're not all one thing, and the more time we spend with people we realize that and we actually find out, oh, we're actually a lot more similar than we think. One of the nice things about getting to work in this medium is the opportunity to prove it through art that people get to hopefully feel good about.

Watching Tina Fey come back to SNL every time Sarah Palin is in the news, are you a little bummed that Joe Biden isn't running for president? 

It's funny, I met him at an event in Central Park. I'd never met him before, and he's exactly what you'd want—couldn't have been more gracious, couldn't have been more kind—but that question was still looming, and I was like, "Hey, I don't care if anybody else knows, but you've got to let me know because I need to know if I should be ready." And he was like, "That's right, I sort of have your career in the palm of my hand, don't I?" And I was like, "A little bit, sir." At that point he insinuated nothing one way or the other, but I will say I was a little disappointed. I would've happily gone back to play him. I haven't spent much time with him, but I liked his vibe. But who knows, maybe 2020, him and Kanye, me and Jay [Pharaoh].

'Race' hits theaters nationwide Friday, February 19, 2016.