NEW YORK
Adam Scott was around 14 when he first became consumed by thoughts of death.
The 53-year-old actor can’t confirm the exact malady that waylaid him, though he thinks it may have been bronchitis. Whatever the case, he does remember spending several days as a bedridden Northern California teen with too much time to contemplate mortality. Prone to drama, Scott eventually became convinced: He was dying, he didn’t believe 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 guy. You know, the gleefully obnoxious antagonist who swiped “Step Brothers” scenes. A sardonic, pink bowtie-donning caterer in the cult favorite series “Party Down.” The adorkable “Parks and Recreation” heartthrob who killed with deadpan delivery and endearing exasperation.
But Scott lately has shown an affinity for the tormented. Take “Severance,” Apple TV’s sci-fi workplace satire, in which he plays a broken man who’d rather bifurcate his brain than live with his trauma. In “The Whisper Man,” the twisty film arriving on Netflix in August, Scott portrays a widowed crime writer searching for his abducted son with his estranged father (Robert De Niro).
Then there’s “Hokum,” Damian McCarthy’s nightmare-fueling horror flick that hit theaters Friday. Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a cantankerous novelist who treks to a remote Irish village to spread his parents’ ashes and finds himself haunted by more than his own unresolved anguish. For an actor who has carved out a slew of career lanes — the disarming everyman, the tortured soul, the domineering scumbag — the scream king performance lets him swerve between them all.
“His range is remarkable,” says Britt Lower, who plays opposite 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 choice for “Hokum.” Yet the idea of any writer assembling a Scott star vehicle still astonishes the man 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 long could Scott have possibly been hustling? A good long while, it turns out, for an actor whose voluminous black hair and boyish looks belie his age. But look for the signs — the flecks of gray in his beard, the reading glasses he uses to peruse a menu — and you realize this is, in fact, a middle-aged dad with a wife of two decades and two teenage kids (a realization that stunned many a TikToker last year).
In person, Scott is courteous and curious with an inviting wit — a far cry from the jerks he so deliciously portrays. As we decide to split the crab fried rice and tofu stir fry at Fish Cheeks, a family style Thai eatery, Scott nixes oysters as an option. “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 intake, having pinned his fitful sleep habits on a weakness for espresso, he does indulge in a Diet Coke to help him through this packed day of press obligations.
It’s the kind of champagne problem the younger Scott would’ve thought was too good to be true. After enrolling in Pasadena’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts out of high school, Scott spent a decade in Southern California grinding through failed auditions, background work and guest spots before finding any kind of stability. Even as Scott booked notable parts in the 2002 legal thriller “High Crimes” and Martin Scorsese’s 2004 biopic “The Aviator,” his fixation on being a “super serious actor” — in 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 past approach perplexes him. He grew up a David Letterman obsessive, after all, who counted “The Jerk,” “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers” among his favorite movies. He relays the story of running into Chris Elliott at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on a long-ago trip to New York as if he had met the pope (which, by the way, he did last year). Yet it wasn’t until Scott landed the role of Derek in 2008’s “Step Brothers” — a slick-haired, carb-avoiding, Guns N’ Roses-singing man-child — that he unleashed his inner comic.
That gig helped him land “Party Down,” the Starz sitcom, and then “Parks and Recreation’s” fan-favorite role 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 fondness 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 once the comedy gigs — “A.C.O.D.,” “The Overnight,” “Krampus,” “Little Evil,” “Ghosted” — started rolling in, little else did. During one hiatus from “Parks,” Scott shot “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” because it was only role that came his way. “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 prestige television in 2017’s “Big Little Lies,” as the doting husband to Reese Witherspoon’s character, he found he needed to audition and campaign and audition again if he wanted to sell the industry 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 those concerns lingered, “Severance” snipped them for good. Premiering in 2022, the first season revealed itself as an addictive mystery box thriller about office drones who split their consciousnesses between work and home personae. The acclaimed second season expanded the mythology and swelled the emotion. The heart of this heady series: Scott’s Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated performance as both Mark Scout, a shell of man refusing to process his wife’s death, and the innocent “innie” who lives out Mark’s working hours.
As Helly, a combative newcomer to the severed workplace, Lower (spoiler alert) eventually interacted with both versions of Mark and saw 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 writer and director of “Hokum,” thought of Scott for Ohm after watching “Severance” and concluding he was sly enough to pull off the movie’s black comedy and compelling enough to lead its lengthy 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 call to discuss a role in “Hokum” he very much wanted but didn’t assume he’d land. McCarthy figured Scott was too in demand to sign on. Beating around the bush, each emerged from the meeting assuming the other 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 recalls with a laugh, “where we both liked each other’s [work] but just didn’t mention it.”
Thus began Scott’s haunting Irish escapade. A ghostly honeymoon suite, a missing hotel staffer, a restless witch — the guilt-ridden, standoffish Ohm confronts all of the above on his eggshell-walking 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 hurt that Scott is the best at being the worst. Exhibits A, B and C: His turns as an office bully in 2013’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a demonic dirtbag on NBC’s “The Good Place” and an adulterous billionaire in the ongoing Apple TV sitcom “Loot.” Asked what makes Scott such a contemptible creep, Plaza posits that “very sweet” people make the best baddies because it’s a rare chance to exorcise those demons. (“Also: His face,” she adds. “He can transform into a person that you want to punch very easily.”)
Scott has always been intrigued by the insufferable. When he saw “Ghostbusters” at 11 years old, his favorite character was not Venkman or Spengler but … EPA inspector Walter Peck? Yes, the wet blanket of an antagonist played by William Atherton. Today, he sees no shortage of villains in the political news 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 point: Toward the end of the first Trump administration, Scott developed a satirical show inspired by a viral photo of Jared Kushner, in which the White House adviser sported body armor over a suit while visiting troops in 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 both the most aspirational of TV husbands and the most unbearable person he can imagine. Sure, he’s more selective nowadays. The lean years, when Scott had an instinct to say yes to everything that was offered and “do it all,” are over. “Eventually,” he says, “I got to a place where I could pick and choose.”
So what’s he picking and choosing? To do it all, funnily enough.
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