One thing is clear from Christopher Lloyd ’s vast and diverse body of work: every character he portrays comes to life when he steps into their shoes. His latest role, playing silent film legend Fatty Arbuckle’s grandson Larry in “ Hacks ,” continues this trend and has earned him his first Primetime Emmy nomination (for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series) in 32 years.

In the “Hacks” episode he’s nominated for, Lloyd plays an eccentric, living in a home surrounded by memorabilia and memories — and a pet falcon. Shot on location in the historic, Queen Anne-style Andrew McNally House built in 1887 in Altadena, the nine-bedroom mansion boasts a three-story rotunda and an aviary.

“I’m not looking for casual acquaintances; I don’t want people knocking on my door selling magazines, nothing like that. I'm protecting my little sanctuary and doing so with great joy,” Lloyd says of Larry. “He’s not someone who seeks out social interaction. He gets agitated, and if he’s in a situation where he doesn’t have control, he starts to become flustered. He probably grew up in this house and feels safe here.”

The remarkable character and intelligent, funny writing he found in “Hacks” is familiar territory for Lloyd, who made his mark on “ Taxi ” back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. On “Taxi,” his Reverend Jim Ignatowski was a quirky cabbie with a big heart and simple mind, who enjoyed drugs a bit more than casually. Despite winning two Emmys for the role, sitcoms in general were not a path he originally envisioned.

“There was a kind of a stupid bias in New York in the early ’60s or mid-’60s that it was kind of selling your soul to go to Hollywood and do a sitcom,” he tells Variety. “Surely, if you are a serious actor, a real actor, you don’t go looking for sitcoms.” He was a theater guy but ventured to Los Angeles anyway — “but with a little bit of that attitude.” Once in L.A., he informed his agent of his attitude about sitcoms, who set him up on sitcom auditions every once in a while, just to meet casting directors. “You never know down the road when that might turn out to be important,” Lloyd recalled his agent saying. One of those times led to his gig on “Taxi.”

“The role captivated me just by reading it,” he recalls. Before he was cast in the second season, he visited the set to observe the actors collaborating. “I thought, these individuals are fantastic. In New York, you always hear about the ideal theater [which] is to create a cohesive ensemble. And I thought, ‘It’s right before my eyes. It’s perfect. And I’ve never changed my perspective on that. I simply believed it was an incredible company. I was thrilled to be a part of it. I thought, ‘This isn’t going awry. This is a positive thing. So I overcame my reservations about sitcoms quickly,” he adds with a grin. “I mean, I don’t have much to complain about.”

Reverend Jim was undeniably a unique character. Always disheveled, stoned, and clueless because of it. The moment he opened his mouth and spoke — anything — you couldn’t help but laugh. (Have some free time? Find clips of Jim scenes on YouTube with his “Taxi” co-stars Danny DeVito, Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Tony Danza, Andy Kaufman, and Jeff Conaway. You won’t regret it.)

“I simply felt like I knew the individual,” says Lloyd. “I understood his essence. At that time, people like him were out on the streets. So I just observed them and my feelings about it, and it worked. … A lot of that performance stemmed from the freedom I felt working with that cast and the exceptional writing team. They made it simple.”

Jim was merely the beginning of a string of character types Lloyd portrayed that share a unique commonality: they still make excellent Halloween costumes. Consider: Reverend Jim on “Taxi,” Doc Brown in the “ Back to the Future ” trilogy, Judge Doom in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” Uncle Fester in “ The Addams Family ” films and Klingon Commander Kruge in “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.”

Lloyd is humbled by the lasting love for Doc Brown, the brilliant, benevolent, oddball inventor of the flux capacitor (“great Scott!”). “I’ve done my share of work, and nothing compares to the way ‘Back to the Future’ is deeply embedded in people’s minds,” he says. “It’s phenomenal. Every day practically — and certainly I go to Comic-Cons — people come up and say, ‘You made my childhood.’ And another reference equal to that, where ‘Back to the Future’ fills the gap in a lot of lives of young people, who have gone on to become doctors, scientists and what have you. So a lot of gratitude and I feel real good about that. I feel very fortunate to be part of that.”

Uncle Fester in the “Addams Family” movies held a special significance for him. He shares how, as a child, his family subscribed to the New Yorker magazine. He never read the articles back then; he only looked at the cartoons. And very often there’d be a Charles Addams cartoon featuring Uncle Fester alongside the rest of the family.

“I loved that,” says Lloyd. “It was mischief about Uncle Fester and not evil. He just could play around a little bit. And then, that period of my life passed and decades later, I get a call, would I like to be Uncle Fester in a film? What are the odds? It was very exciting to be able to portray the character that I loved when I was a kid.”

Back then, that kid would also probably never have believed that someday he’d be an action figure, but Lloyd is that too. Trekkies out there know what I’m talking about — the foot-tall Klingon Commander Kruge doll is a spitting image of Lloyd. From the moment “The Search for Spock” director Leonard Nimoy asked him to wear the character’s prosthetic forehead, evil brows and goatee, a supervillain was instantly born.

“I would arrive at the Paramount Studio at four in the morning to get my makeup applied — the way it built up my forehead — and then put on my costume. How can you not feel like you are the character when you do all that?” he inquires. “I loved it. I tried to find what it is about this guy that I could connect with an audience in a way that they would feel something about themselves in this guy — even if it’s somebody you don’t want at your dinner table, you know? It doesn’t change his undesirable traits, but I want the audience to feel they’re not engaged with somebody off a different planet. They’re engaged with somebody they can relate to.”