The 53-year-old actor can’t verify the precise illness that waylaid him, although he thinks it might have been bronchitis. Whatever the case, he does bear in mind spending a number of days as a bedridden Northern California teen with an excessive amount of time to ponder mortality. Prone to drama, Scott ultimately turned satisfied: He was dying, he didn’t consider in an afterlife and that was that.
“I started reframing everything, kind of thinking of everything as exceedingly temporary,” Scott says over lunch on this late April afternoon in NoHo. “All you have to do is look at a photograph in an old hotel of a large group of people, like in ‘The Shining,’ and just be like, ‘All dead. Every 100 years, all new people.’”
It’s heavy stuff for a comedy man. You know, the gleefully obnoxious antagonist who swiped “Step Brothers” scenes. A sardonic, pink bowtie-donning caterer within the cult favourite collection “Party Down.” The adorkable “Parks and Recreation” heartthrob who killed with deadpan supply and endearing exasperation.
But Scott these days has proven an affinity for the tormented. Take “Severance,” Apple TV’s sci-fi office satire, through which he performs a damaged man who’d quite bifurcate his mind than dwell together with his trauma. In “The Whisper Man,” the twisty movie arriving on Netflix in August, Scott portrays a widowed crime author looking for his kidnapped son together with his estranged father (Robert De Niro).
Then there’s “Hokum,” Damian McCarthy’s nightmare-fueling horror flick that hit theaters Friday. Scott performs Ohm Bauman, a cantankerous novelist who treks to a distant Irish inn to unfold his dad and mom’ ashes and finds himself haunted by greater than his personal unresolved anguish. For an actor who has carved out a slew of profession lanes – the disarming everyman, the tortured soul, the domineering scumbag – the scream king efficiency lets him swerve between all of them.
“His range is remarkable,” says Britt Lower, who performs reverse Scott on “Severance.” “They say you always want to cast a clown as King Lear because they have the ability to go to the agony and the ecstasy with a character’s perspective, and Adam has that access to vulnerability. He’s really available, and the audience can really step into his perspective.”
It’s why Dan Erickson envisioned Scott when writing “Severance,” and McCarthy pinpointed him as his first selection for “Hokum.” Yet the thought of any author assembling a Scott star car nonetheless astonishes the person behind that wheel.
“At first, I’m only suspicious,” Scott acknowledges. “Whenever someone reaches out proactively, I’m immediately like, ‘Okay, well, what’s wrong with it?’ I think that’s just a symptom of struggling for a good chunk of time.”
Wait a second: How lengthy might Scott have presumably been hustling? A great lengthy whereas, it seems, for an actor whose voluminous black hair and boyish appears to be like belie his age. But search for the indicators – the flecks of grey in his beard, the studying glasses he makes use of to peruse a menu – and also you understand that is, actually, a middle-aged dad with a spouse of 20 years and two teenage youngsters (a realization that shocked many a TikToker final 12 months).
In particular person, Scott is courteous and curious with an inviting wit – a far cry from the jerks he so deliciously portrays. As we resolve to separate the crab fried rice and tofu stir fry at Fish Cheeks, a household type Thai eatery, Scott nixes oysters as an possibility. “I had food poisoning on the set of ‘Madame Web,’” he says. “I literally had to excuse myself and go throw up in the bushes, and an ambulance came and I spent the night at the ER in Boston.” Although Scott is watching his caffeine consumption, having pinned his fitful sleep habits on a weak spot for espresso, he does take pleasure in a Diet Coke to assist him by way of this packed day of press obligations.
It’s the form of champagne drawback the youthful Scott would’ve thought was too good to be true. After enrolling in Pasadena’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts out of highschool, Scott spent a decade in Southern California grinding by way of failed auditions, background work and visitor spots earlier than discovering any form of stability. Even as Scott booked notable components within the 2002 authorized thriller “High Crimes” and Martin Scorsese’s 2004 biopic “The Aviator,” his fixation on being a “super serious actor” – within the vein of Harrison Ford or Al Pacino – proved limiting. “I couldn’t even get auditions for comedy,” he says, “because people didn’t think I was funny.”
In hindsight, Scott’s previous method perplexes him. He grew up a David Letterman obsessive, in spite of everything, who counted “The Jerk,” “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers” amongst his favourite motion pictures. He relays the story of operating into Chris Elliott at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on a long-ago journey to New York as if he had met the pope (which, by the way in which, he did final 12 months). Yet it wasn’t till Scott landed the position of Derek in 2008’s “Step Brothers” – a slick-haired, carb-avoiding, Guns N’ Roses-singing man-child – that he unleashed his internal comedian.
That gig helped him land “Party Down,” the Starz sitcom, after which “Parks and Recreation’s” fan-favorite position of Ben Wyatt. Starring on the NBC mockumentary from 2010 to 2015, Scott lent a lovable neurosis to that numbers-crunching public servant with a keenness for calzones and claymation.
“It’s one thing to be able to improvise and be funny, but it’s another thing to just be a very talented, great actor,” says Aubrey Plaza, his “Parks” co-star. “He’s operating on both levels. It was very, very fun to work with him, because he just was able to commit fully, but then also f— around.”
But as soon as the comedy gigs – “A.C.O.D.,” “The Overnight,” “Krampus,” “Little Evil,” “Ghosted” – began rolling in, little else did. During one hiatus from “Parks,” Scott shot “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” as a result of it was the one position that got here his manner. “I probably shouldn’t have (accepted it),” he concedes. “It was super fun and I loved working with those guys, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to do a movie.” By the time Scott swerved to status tv in 2017’s “Big Little Lies,” because the doting husband to Reese Witherspoon’s character, he discovered he wanted to audition and marketing campaign and audition once more if he needed to promote the business on his dramatic chops.
“I wasn’t being sought out for anything that wasn’t comedic, and I was having a hard time,” Scott says. “I wanted to signal that I could do something else.”
If these issues lingered, “Severance” snipped them for good. Premiering in 2022, the primary season revealed itself as an addictive thriller field thriller about workplace drones who break up their consciousnesses between work and residential personae. The acclaimed second season expanded the mythology and swelled the emotion. The coronary heart of this heady collection: Scott’s Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated efficiency as each Mark Scout, a shell of man refusing to course of his spouse’s dying, and the harmless “innie” who lives out Mark’s working hours.
As Helly, a combative newcomer to the severed office, Lower (spoiler alert) ultimately interacted with each variations of Mark and noticed the breadth of Scott’s transformation. His posture slouches. His intonation shifts.
“I was just so impressed by the distinct frequency that outie Mark had,” Lower says. “It was so subtle but so significant, the internal shift that Adam had crafted to present this really different iteration of the same human body. He’s just so flexible.”
McCarthy, the Irish author and director of “Hokum,” considered Scott for Ohm after watching “Severance” and concluding he was sly sufficient to tug off the film’s black comedy and compelling sufficient to guide its prolonged dialogue-free stretches. “He’s very naturally charming and charismatic, and he’s very funny,” McCarthy says. “But he can play those characters as well who are very prickly.”
As an enthusiastic fan of “Oddity,” McCarthy’s 2024 ghost story breakout, Scott hopped on a name to debate a job in “Hokum” he very a lot needed however didn’t assume he’d land. McCarthy figured Scott was too in demand to signal on. Beating across the bush, every emerged from the assembly assuming the opposite was uninterested.
“It was like two guys on a Zoom who are way too nice, so neither one of us really wanted to go out on a limb and ask the other one if they wanted to work,” Scott says. “And our (mutual) agent was like, ‘You guys … talk to each other.’”
“That was our first somewhat awkward meeting,” McCarthy remembers with fun, “where we both liked each other’s (work) but just didn’t mention it.”
Thus started Scott’s haunting Irish escapade. A ghostly honeymoon suite, a lacking lodge staffer, a stressed witch – the guilt-ridden, standoffish Ohm confronts the entire above on his path to absolution.
“He is an unpleasant person when we find him, but it’s for a very specific reason,” Scott explains. “It was sort of reverse osmosis, as far as the usual arc for characters in horror movies, which start out as a soft naiveté that turns into kind of a hard, battle-worn character. This guy starts that way and maybe opens up a little bit as he has to fight for survival.”
It doesn’t harm that Scott is the most effective at being the worst. Exhibits A, B and C: His turns as an workplace bully in 2013’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a demonic dirtbag on NBC’s “The Good Place” and an adulterous billionaire within the ongoing Apple TV sitcom “Loot.” Asked what makes Scott such a contemptible creep, Plaza posits that “very sweet” folks make the most effective baddies as a result of it’s a uncommon likelihood to exorcise these demons. (“Also: His face,” she provides. “He can transform into a person that you want to punch very easily.”)
Scott has at all times been intrigued by the unbearable. When he noticed “Ghostbusters” at 11 years outdated, his favourite character was not Venkman or Spengler however … EPA inspector Walter Peck? Yes, the moist blanket of an antagonist performed by William Atherton. Today, the opinionated Scott sees no scarcity of villains within the political information cycle.
“I find a–holes really entertaining in real life, like Pete Hegseth and JD Vance,” Scott says. “They’re horrifying human beings, and it kind of zaps the joy out of it when you consider that they have actual power, but (I’m interested in them) as characters.”
Case in level: Toward the tip of the primary Trump administration, Scott developed a satirical present impressed by a viral photograph of Jared Kushner, through which the White House adviser sported physique armor over a swimsuit whereas visiting troops within the Middle East. “I wanted to play that guy,” he says. “It was going to date itself too quickly, but it was a fun idea.”
Such is Scott’s duality: He’ll eagerly inhabit each probably the most aspirational of TV husbands and probably the most insufferable particular person he can think about. Sure, he’s extra selective these days. The lean years, when Scott had an intuition to say sure to every thing that was provided and “do it all,” are over. “Eventually,” he says, “I got to a place where I could pick and choose.”
So what’s he choosing and selecting? To do all of it, funnily sufficient.