Shirtless Ricky Gervais & Ellie Kemper: 'GQ' Comedy Features!

Ricky Gervais goes shirtless for a feature in GQ magazine’s June 2013 issue (with James Franco on the cover)!

Here’s what the 51-year-old comedian and actor had to share:

On the ending of The Office: “You know, it wasn’t my baby. It was my rights, so I cashed the checks. I think it was good, but I didn’t have the same emotional attachment to it.”

On being worried about how people see him: “This will sound arrogant: I don’t worry about it at all. I think I’m pretty self-aware. I think I know what I’m doing. You know when you’ve been a prat, you know when you’re being a prat, you know when something sounds pretentious. But you’re right�”by definition you don’t know. It’s funny, Christopher Guest said to me�”we were talking about comedians we used to like and if people go off the boil�”and he was basically saying: ‘What if we become the people we don’t rate anymore? What if we lose it and we don’t know it?’ And I went (grins), ‘Who cares?’”

On what he talked about with David Bowie: “Music and comedy. I think I might have said what a huge fan I was. And I think he liked my stuff. He introduced me at Madison Square Garden�”you are asking! I got him to do a little thing in Extras. I remember we went round his flat, and it’s exactly as you’d expect it to be�”just beautiful and tasteful and modern, and there’s this wonderful statue. And I went, ‘Oh, that’s amazing.’ (slips into a perfect David Bowie impression) ‘Yeah, the artist, what he’s trying to do there is do the 3-D representation of Picasso’s 2-D representation of 3-D…(pauses)… My daughter likes to hit it with a hammer.’ I love people like that, because they’re sort of aware of who they are. The first time he buzzed me in, the concierge called up [to his flat] and said, ‘Mr. Jones?’ Of course he’s Mr. Jones! He’s not f–king David Bowie! I met David Jones.”

Ricky was joined in the magazine by The Office U.S. star Ellie Kemper.

For more on Ricky, visit GQ.com! Also be sure to check out Ellie‘s feature.