It’s Tuesday, just after 2 p.m. and the backdrop is Cravings, a restaurant situated on Sunset Plaza, the strip of pricey sidewalk cafes and designer boutiques in West Hollywood. Actor Rex Lee has just arrived for a late lunch and is picking at fried calamari as he waits for his pan-seared duck to arrive.

The setting is stilted and intimidating; thankfully, Lee is not. After I shamelessly hand him a blue cotton tee emblazoned with the KoreAm logo, he holds it up and declares, “Awesome! I love gifts and I love that you actually read about me and know what I would like. Way to get me in a better mood.”

That’s all the jumpstart our conversation needs, as the 38-year-old T-shirt collector is more than willing to pour out his life story, starting with his birth in Warren, Ohio, to how he came to be “Lloyd,” the favored underdog on HBO’s “Entourage.”

The youngest child of an anesthesiologist and a homemaker, Lee spent most of his early years in Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston, in a predominantly white neighborhood.

“He loved to entertain,” recalls Lee’s sister Jane, a financial software consultant in Long Beach. “He was just real happy and liked to dance around the house. He just had that sort of, I guess, exuberance.”

Rex Lee plays “Lloyd,” assistant to Jeremy Piven’s “Ari” on “Entourage.”

The family relocated to Downey, Calif., when Lee was 9 years old. It marked the beginning of rebellion for Jane, who dreamed of becoming a rock singer, while Lee became the kind of kid Korean parents love to ask their kids to emulate. He made good grades, became a talented piano player, scored second in the district on his middle-school math placement test, and ended up skipping the seventh grade.

After attending Servite High School in Anaheim, Lee headed back to Ohio to attend Oberlin College’s renowned music conservatory, with the intention of becoming a pianist.

It was midway through his junior year when Lee realized he didn’t want to become a musician.

“I quit playing piano without knowing what was happening next. I started taking dance classes, but I really don’t have a body that conforms to the stereotype of what a dancer’s body should look like.

“I knew I had this very intense desire to create and be creative and artistic, but I didn’t know what that meant. … Then I took my very first acting class.”

Graduating from college a semester early with a bachelor’s degree in music, Lee avoided joining the workforce by going to France through a study abroad program.

“I went to France to learn French, but also to run away from this country and figure out — make up my mind — about whether or not I was going to take a shot at becoming an actor.”

Four months later, Lee returned to Ohio, picked up his diploma and headed to Los Angeles.