How Adam Scott Became the King of Work

In today’s newsletter, reflecting on time with the “Severance” star, and then:

Rachel Syme
Staff writer

At first glance, the people I wrote about in the past year—the filmmaker Sofia Coppola, the theatre director Rachel Chavkin, the Parisian perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, and now, for this week’s issue, the actor Adam Scott—would seem an eclectic bunch, with little in common. But you can always form a daisy chain by looking backward, and I can now see that this year I have been interested in people who have managed, after much dogged commitment, to carve out a highly specific, sui-generis niche for themselves. I like to take on a subject whose body of work reveals an overarching theme (or a persistent, nagging idea, or even an obsession, depending on how you tilt your head). For Scott, it is portraying a certain type of endearing working Everyman. With his affable, understated presence and sly, sardonic timing, Scott has quietly become the preëminent actor of the modern workplace comedy—nobody plays “guy you might joke with around the office water cooler” better. And now, with “Severance,” which returns for a second season on January 17th, he has finally become a major Hollywood star.

Stardom is not entirely comfortable for Scott, who spent the first fifteen years of his career grinding it out in semi-obscurity as a struggling actor in Los Angeles. When we first met this fall, at a pizza place in L.A.’s Studio City, he told me that every time he has a new project his “default position is to think it will either make zero noise or be embarrassing.” He has a self-deprecating, sarcastic mien, punctuated by moments of staid nerdiness or punny Dad jokes. And yet it is his underdog bona fides that have, ironically, helped to fuel his celebrity. Scott’s career began to take off when he leaned into his insecurities for comedic effect.

I became a fan in 2009, when Scott starred in the cult-popular Starz comedy series “Party Down,” as a failed actor turned catering bartender whose nihilistic veneer belied an inner core of sweetness. He is so funny on that show, and also unexpectedly poignant in his portrayal of a man teetering between complacency and ambition. Joining the cast of the hit NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation” made Scott much more famous, and also, ultimately, turned him into a beloved Internet meme.

But it was on the sci-fi series “Severance,” which premièred on AppleTV+ in early 2022, that Scott began to express himself fully. He plays another working stiff, but this time with a dystopian twist. His character, Mark Scout, is a “severed” employee at a sinister corporation that has invented a microchip brain implant that can split a person’s consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie”—an office self and a home self. The innie and the outie know of each others’ existence, but otherwise their memories are completely separated. The role is a true tour de force for Scott, who has to play two different men, inhabiting the same mind.

Scott himself has never had a traditional nine-to-five job, though he does bring to his roles many years of slogging through bit parts and bad auditions. His Mark radiates existential sadness, but you can still sense a glimmer of hope burbling below. In the course of our time together—we had many conversations this fall and winter, including several while driving around Hollywood in his electric Porsche—I found a person who retains a healthy dose of skepticism about the business and his place in it. We talked about his search for his own innie and outie; about his long history of pop-culture fixations; about the painstaking process behind making a puzzle-box show; and more. Please enjoy this window into an actor’s working life—consider it a kind of performance review to kick off the year. Read Syme’s Profile of Adam Scott »

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