Adam Scott, the busy star of Severance, Apple TV’s red-hot dystopian drama, and the much-loved Parks and Recreation, has spent much of his career cultivating a disarming, quietly subversive screen presence. For years, he has specialised in characters who appear, at first glance, to be Everymen, only for them to reveal sharper edges. He works in delicate movements, even if he’s not so sure about that.
“I always watch myself and worry I’m being too big,” Scott says. “I think about someone like Robert Duvall or Albert Brooks, and how effective and authentic they are, and I see me, and I shudder.”
Scott brings texture and complexity to Hokum, the Irish director Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to the recent cult favourite Oddity.
“I was already a fan of Damian’s,” the actor says. “Oddity fascinated me. I wanted to know the mind behind it, because he makes these wild choices to keep the camera on inanimate objects and stay for an uncomfortable amount of time on things that are not alive. It really frightened me.”
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Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a successful but troubled horror novelist who visits a remote corner of Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes at the hotel where they honeymooned. Bauman’s visit is shaped by unresolved, unnamed grief: his mother died in tragic circumstances, and his father’s subsequent retreat into alcohol compounded the writer’s early trauma.
Bauman encounters a group of eccentric locals, including a magic-mushroom-gathering wild man and a patient young woman, Fiona, who disappears after a Halloween gathering. Feeling a personal responsibility to find her, Bauman investigates despite the suspicious resistance of the manager of the hotel.
The search leads him to its purportedly haunted honeymoon suite and down into the bowels of the earth, where he encounters a series of increasingly disturbing figures.
“I had never been to west Cork or Skibbereen before,” Scott says. “It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth. When we weren’t shooting I would just go get lost, walking and listening to podcasts.
West Cork is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. When we weren’t shooting I would just go get lost, walking and listening to podcasts
“Being on location is sometimes a real mixed bag, because it’s lonely without my family. But this was great. I stayed at the Liss Ard Estate. There were a lot of people either on their honeymoon or on their anniversary trip. I was just the American weirdo staying upstairs. I loved it. And it lent itself to the story.”
It is testament to Scott’s range as a performer that he can always find new scope with cads and bounders. He clips his nails at the dinner table as the leader of the “Bad Place” in the metaphysical sitcom The Good Place; he throws office supplies at Ben Stiller in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; he wears a black turtleneck and dismisses an inquiry from an audience member as a “stupid question” in Art School Confidential.
In this spirit, his character in Hokum burns a friendly bellhop with a heated spoon.
“He’s an asshole,” Scott says of Bauman. “What makes a person like that? And how do you untangle that with someone who isn’t particularly interested in untangling it? I thought it was a really fun prospect.”
Scott has dabbled in horror (as well as abrasive characters) before. Last year he took a flame-thrower to the cursed wind-up toy at the centre of Osgood Perkins’s extravagantly gruesome The Monkey. In fact, his first movie role saw him serving hellish forces aligned with the iconic movie monster Pinhead in Hellraiser IV: Bloodline.
“It just happened that way, honestly,” Scott says. “Hellraiser IV was my first job in a movie. For the first 15 years or so of my career there was nothing strategic about any of it. It was just about getting the next job. I didn’t understand people who were, like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I want to do that.’ Some of my classmates were really snobby about what they were going to do. But I was, like, ‘I will do absolutely anything’.”
Raised in Santa Cruz, California, the youngest of three children, Scott developed an early fascination with film and television after observing the transformation of his hometown to facilitate a 1981 adaptation of East of Eden, starring Jane Seymour, Bruce Boxleitner, Karen Allen and Lloyd Bridges.
“I didn’t know anyone in show business at all,” says Scott. “I just saw Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was, like, eight or nine years old and thought, That’s what I want to do.”
After enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, Scott set out for Hollywood with ambitions of becoming a serious dramatic actor. In the 1990s, he had brief but memorable arcs in both Party of Five and Boy Meets World. He worked alongside Jane Fonda and Jennifer Lopez in Monster in Law, dipped a toe in such franchises as Star Trek and ER, and played a fast-talking agent in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.
Mostly, his early years in Hollywood were characterised by auditions, minor roles and near misses, a grind Scott later parlayed into the cult series Party Down, a sharply observed comedy about a group of struggling actors working as caterers. The series was rooted in the professional uncertainty that follows many actors throughout their careers.
“I am very glad I had a slow-burn career,” he says. “Even after things started to coalesce it took a few years to get out of the head space of being out of work.”
Comedy catapulted Scott close to the limelight, most notably as Will Ferrell’s obnoxious yuppie sibling in the riotous Step Brothers, and as the seismologist “final boy” of Piranha 3D.
I still get excited walking on to a set and seeing something photorealistic
“I had no comedy resume to speak of,” Scott says. “Because I figured it would never happen, I was relaxed, and I think that helped. When they said, ‘Come back and read with Will Ferrell,’ I thought, ‘Oh my God!’
“That experience of working with those people, their improvisation and the lack of preciousness they have for rooting around and trying to find the best way through a scene, that was something I wanted to continue.”
Off screen, Scott has maintained a relatively low profile. He also runs a production company with his wife, Naomi, developing film and television projects while balancing fatherhood and acting work in Los Angeles. He is one of the hosts of a long-running music podcast dedicated to such performers as REM, U2, Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen.
They say never meet your idols, but the Scott’s proximity to celebrity has not dampened his fan-boy enthusiasms.
“Quite the contrary,” he says. “I still get excited walking on to a set and seeing something photorealistic. That still gives me butterflies. When I was a kid, and they shot that TV series in my neighbourhood, that just blew my mind. That feeling has never gone away. And I still get excited by the music I loved as a teenager.”
Starting in 2010, over almost 100 episodes of the Emmy-winning Parks and Recreation, Scott played Ben Wyatt, a drily comic, detail-oriented state auditor turned public servant and counterpoint to the tyrannically sunny Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler.
“With Parks and Rec, we were always on the verge of cancellation,” he says.
Late blooming is something of a theme with Scott. Just as Parks and Rec crawled its way toward a sizeable audience, Party Down took a winding route to success. The witty show was cancelled in 2010, then, a full 13 years later, resurrected after finding a global audience on DVD.
My face was up on billboards. That was something I’d always thought I wanted. But when it happened, it just scared me
— Adam Scott
“Our series finale got 13,000 viewers,” Scott says. “Creatively, it worked to our advantage, because we thought no one would see it, so we were just making it for ourselves and having fun. Then, years later, it connected.”
Ironically, Scott’s biggest success has been the project that scared him the most. When Severance debuted on Apple TV, in 2022, it was reported to be the most expensive streaming series ever produced, with an estimated budget of $20 million (€17 million) an episode.
The show, which is largely directed by Stiller, is set in the fictional Kafkaesque environs of Lumon Industries, where employees undergo a procedure that separates their consciousness into two parts: an “innie,” who exists only at work, and an “outie,” who exists only outside work, neither having any memories of the other.
Scott essentially plays dual roles: the innie Mark S, who processes data with colleagues who have had the same procedure, and the outie Mark Scout, a former history professor fraught with grief.
Lumon, the mysterious company they work for, is overseen by sinister managers whose consciousness has not been severed in two.
“I was petrified when Severance came out,” Scott says. “None of us knew how it was going to be received. I thought people were just going to make fun of us.
“My face was up on billboards. That was something I’d always thought I wanted. But when it happened, it just scared me. You realise you have no control over how something is received.”
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He need not have worried. When the second season premiered, in 2025, it became the most-watched series in Apple TV’s history, trouncing Ted Lasso, the previous record holder. At last year’s Primetime Emmy Awards, the series received 27 nominations, the most for any show that year, and won eight, making it the most-decorated series of the ceremony.
“It’s such a big conceptual swing,” Scott says. “It could have just not worked. I thought it might be too weird. And then, suddenly, terms from the show, like ‘innie’ and ‘outie’, started working their way into the lexicon and into pop culture. From the moment it came out, it landed.”
So fervent was the discussion around season two that the team found themselves in possession of potentially valuable secrets.
“For security reasons, we had to start using code words when we were sending scripts back and forth,” he says. “I’m still in a state of relief. It’s been like a four-year exhale. I can breathe now.”
Hokum is in cinemas from Friday, May 1st
