Matt Keeslar is the star of the new ABC Family series The Middleman. It’s strange, it’s quirky, and it’s loaded with more pop culture references than a full season of Gilmore Girls. A cross between The X-Files and Get Smart, The Middleman is fighting evil, so you don’t have to.

Ah, finally, an actor who thinks my absurd questions, aren’t absurd at all. Take it away, Matt!

What’s something that you have hung onto since you were a kid?

MATT: Mostly books. I have a book called, “Super Pickle” that actually now I’m reading to my son. I don’t even know who it’s by, but it was about a flying pickle that saved other vegetables from danger.

So Middleman-ish!

MATT: It’s very Middleman-ish actually, yeah, in a way it has the same kind of weird tongue-in-cheek humor in it. I have my diary or journal that I’ve been keeping ever since I was elementary school. So really the written word, I guess, is what I’ve been keeping since I was child.

Do you think of yourself as a writer?

MATT: I actually feel like writing, for me, since I’ve been doing since I was a kid, it is always been more therapeutic, a way of getting my thoughts out and less about the idea of publication. In fact, when I go back and re-read my diaries, they’re so repetitive and sort of mundane that I don’t think that anyone would be interested in reading them.

And now my most famous question: Captain Kirk versus Captain Jack Sparrow?

MATT: I think, Captain Kirk and Captain Jack Sparrow are two sides of the same coin; you have the ultimate sort of man in control in Captain Kirk, the captain of the Enterprise and the person who is able to make decisions quickly and forcefully and to steer the ship in the right direction. And then you know, Captain Jack Sparrow who is the complete intuitive, instinctive captain who just does things by feel, does things by the way that his emotion, or his heart and the compass guide him. So I think that, they’re remarkably different, but also very similar and two sides of a leader that need to be incorporated in order to steer a ship on its right course.

You can read more of Matt’s interview at SFUniverse.com and be sure to tune to ABC Family on Monday, June 16, for the premiere of The Middleman.