Now he's playing the leading role in The Angry Birds Movie, an animated adventure based on the phone-app game. But he found the job a bit lonely, recording his character's lines in a sound studio in Manhattan. "The one thing that you miss, and the biggest difference, is the interaction," Sudeikis says. "The chemistry that comes across on-screen is actually created by the people that did the sound mixing and the animation. They make the real magic happen by making it appear as if we're all in the same place at the same time. And for me, who spends most of my time working in ensembles, I miss that. But you get to have that on the other side when you meet up and travel around selling the film!"

Sudeikis admits that he didn't know much about Angry Birds before he got the role ("I've spent more time being in the game than playing the game"), but he loved the script by Jon Vitti, a veteran comedy writer who has worked on everything from The Simpsons to The Office. And he found his character Red a challenge. "He's the definition of angry," he laughs. "Red is a contrarian. He's a little frustrated. He's definitely the black sheep. He reminds me of Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest!"

The Angry Birds - Red and the Pigs

And he laughs that playing the role put him in touch with the anger inside him. "There's just a ton in my world that makes me really angry and ticked off," he jokes. "I especially hate when people forget their manners. A little thing like holding the door open for people and then people not saying thank you or even giving you eye contact. That seems odd. When someone lives an existence of forgetting they're around other people my eyebrows probably twitch in a similar way to Red's."

Sudeikis likes the film's message about anger being a justified emotion that should not be repressed. "Letting it out, every now and then, actually is a healthy thing," he says. "And it did help, going through these voice-recording sessions. Five hours at a time of pretending to be an action hero, yelling and screaming, does exercise or exorcise those demons. As does a really long, late, drunken night of karaoke."

Watch the trailer for Angry Birds The Movie: