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If it were up to Steve Martin, he wouldn't bother talking about his new movie.

“I've always been short of those anecdotes,” he shrugged the other day. “You know, people say, ‘Tell us something really funny that happened.' Well nothing, you know?” He chuckled. “There's not much to say, you know? Except to say that it's fun – which is the most boring thing.”

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Martin was sitting on a couch the other day in a Ritz-Carlton Hotel suite that offered a rich man's view of Central Park. A sheaf of posters for the movie in question lay at his feet, awaiting his autograph. He was dressed stylishly for a man of 63, though not aggressively so, in a beige checked sport coat, dark blue pants, and – a Los Angeles touch amid a dreary New York winter – a pair of eye-catching fuchsia socks. He sported new glasses whose hip tortoiseshell frames almost masked their bifocal purpose.

He continued. “I've grown to believe in the Jack Nicholson approach to promotion. When he promotes a film, he goes to a basketball game, and [photographers] take shots of him. Really, I really believe that it's boring for everybody to talk about a film. ‘And then what did you do? And how did you get the accent? And then this? And then this?' I don't even think the audience even cares. It's really about being visible for a while, and the studio promotion takes care of why you're visible, and all you have to do is be kind of interesting, you know?”

Which is just as well, because making movies may be the least interesting thing Steve Martin does, even if it has the highest profile. (Oh, sorry: His latest is The Pink Panther 2, which opens Friday.) There's the prose work: humorous essays for The New Yorker, the well-received 2007 autobiography Born Standing Up, the novellas The Pleasure of My Company and Shopgirl; the playwriting, including Picasso at the Lapin Agile and a more recent adaptation of Carl Sternheim's farce The Underpants; the art collecting: He is a seasoned collector of modern works including those of Willem de Kooning; and the banjo playing, 45 years of which has now culminated in his first full-length music album, The Crow, from which he has been playing selections while promoting his movie, including recent appearances on Saturday Night Live and Live with Regis and Kelly.

All of which occasionally leads to people calling Martin a renaissance man, a tag he smoothly mocked. “If I were a renaissance man, I'd be wearing puffy clothing,” he chortled. “No. I think a renaissance man is science-based, art-based. I mean, that's what I think they were, they were motivated by the developments in science, turning away from the church, you know. I feel like a sophisticated dilettante.”

Nice turn, that: fusing the low-grade boast of “sophisticated” to the humility of “dilettante.” It's the same careful balancing act Martin has trod for years in cultivating his public persona. But his desire to do a suave send-up of superciliousness can sometimes feel at odds with reality. You can hear the gears of abasement grinding.

An hour before this interview, as a press conference with his Pink Panther 2 co-star Jean Reno and director Harald Zwart kicked off, Martin made a couple of self-effacing quips that served to focus the energy in the room on him. When an entertainment reporter asked if he held the record for the most hosting appearances on SNL, Martin affected the petulant tones of a peevish prince and snapped, “Yes!” The faux hauteur was a joke, of course. But while, on a young comedian, the pose used to read as mockery of a Hollywood star's self-love, on a celebrated actor and writer whose mustachioed mug is on a thousand movie posters around town, and who possesses such literary bona fides that he snagged a thirtysomething editor at The New Yorker for his second wife, it walks dangerously close to seeming like actual self-love.

Though, it is true, when you get him alone, and he no longer feels the need to fill the room, he relaxes into reflection and flints off sparks of modesty. He admits that, while he loves working on dramas such as David Mamet's 1997 Kafkaesque thriller Spanish Prisoner, in which he played a menacing con man, the switch is sometimes hard for the public to make. Now, he has come to accept, “there's some really great dramatic actors who could do just as well as me.” He restricts himself to comedies, “because I think it's what I do best.”

Besides, even a bit of fluff like his latest movie has its challenges. In Pink Panther 2, Martin returns to the role of the bumbling French detective made famous by Peter Sellers. Though The Pink Panther – the 2006 version with Martin in it – didn't get much love from critics, families embraced it enough to make it a modest box-office success and spurn a green light for its sequel. The new film teams up Martin with a quartet of investigators (including Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) to solve a series of high-profile heists that include the inevitable theft of the Pink Panther diamond.

“You know, you look at a film like Pink Panther 2 – and anything with a 2 after it is automatically dismissed, although I do think this film's better than the first,” he said. “But you know, people don't realize that we actually do care. We care a lot about it. And trying to make those scenes work, not only in the writing, in the performance, in the editing, it is serious. I mean, we're seriously earnest and nobody's going ‘Ah, let's knock this off so we can go do some serious thing somewhere else.' ”

He will, however, be getting back to “some serious thing” after he wraps up the movie publicity tour. (After this week in New York, he's headed out to Moscow, Berlin, Madrid and Paris.) Some time ago, he began sketching out a novel set in the art and auction world between the years 1994 – when the market began taking off – and 2008, when it hit a wall.

“I want to challenge myself, but also I think I now have more skills,” he explained. “Before, I was just a little nervous about writing something too long.”

He will not, however, be challenging himself to go back to the stage any time soon. In the late eighties, he and Robin Williams played Vladimir and Estragon, respectively, in a production of Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center directed by Mike Nichols. Frankly, the hours were too long.

“I don't go for the eight shows a week,” he said. “I feel like, when I did Waiting for Godot, I thought, this would be great if it was one show a night. But those two-show days, they exhaust my performing steam. You start having to conserve, conserve. And, you know, I used to say that Actors Equity is the worst union in the world, because, ‘Here's the deal: You're gonna get Christmas off, but next week you have to make it up and you'll do nine shows.' It's like, that's not a day off!”