In late 2012, Dan Erickson was a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter in L.A., working a dull job in office management at a door-parts company. Day after day, he sat at a computer monitor cataloguing hinges and cabinet pulls. He longed to escape the drudgery, but he needed the money; he was saddled with debt, and drove a dinky scooter to save on gas. One morning, while walking into work, Erickson had a thought: What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done? During his lunch breaks, he began turning this idea into a pilot for a high-concept workplace thriller called “Severance.” The result was part “The Office,” part “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has invented a microchip brain implant that can bisect a person’s consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie”—an office self and a home self. Lumon employees who choose to have the implant installed work on a subterranean “severed floor” of Lumon’s headquarters. The chip is activated as they ride an elevator down, erasing their knowledge of their outside lives. Their home selves, in turn, know nothing of what happens within the office’s walls. The show’s protagonist, Mark Scout, is a severed man toiling in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Department, sorting numbers into arbitrary groupings. Outside the office, his outie is a bereft widower who chose to sever his mind just to get some emotional relief. At work, his innie is upbeat, affable, on task—and, like his severed co-workers, effectively trapped forever at the office, by design.
From the time Erickson began writing the script, he had the actor Adam Scott in mind for the role. Erickson had admired Scott’s performance in the hit NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” as Ben Wyatt, a geeky budget adviser who ultimately wins the heart of the show’s protagonist, the bubbly bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). “Parks,” along with the cult comedy series “Party Down,” about a group of failed actors turned cater waiters, helped establish Scott as an endearing version of TV’s working Everyman, whose sardonic veneer belies an inner core of hopeful sweetness. This métier has been defined, in part, by Scott’s physical appearance, which straddles the line between hunky and nondescript—medium height, slightly hangdog eyes, thick chestnut hair that juts like a cockatiel’s crest. As Michael Schur, the co-creator of “Parks,” put it to me, “He’s memorable in unmemorable parts.” “Severance,” an office dystopia, needed a guy regular enough to ground viewers in the rules of its heightened sci-fi world but intriguing enough to make you suspect that he’s more than a drone.
In 2015, the head of television at Red Hour, a production company run by the actor and director Ben Stiller, received Erickson’s pilot, which also made the BloodList, an online compendium of promising unproduced horror scripts. Stiller, who had previously directed both madcap film comedies (“Zoolander,” “Tropic Thunder”) and a dark television drama (“Escape at Dannemora”), immediately took to the concept, and he and Erickson began revising the script in 2016. With no awareness of Erickson’s casting idea, Stiller told me recently, he, too, concluded that Mark should be played by Adam Scott. Stiller and Scott had worked together briefly in 2013, when Scott had a small role as an office bully in Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and they’d kept in touch. Stiller, who spent his own early career feeling pigeonholed as a tightly wound straight man in comedies like “Meet the Parents” and “There’s Something About Mary,” knew that Scott yearned to play more dramatically challenging characters. “There are actors like Bryan Cranston who get to go to another place when people see them in a certain role,” Stiller told me, referring to Cranston’s reputational leap from playing a sitcom dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” to a ruthless drug lord on “Breaking Bad.” “That’s what I felt with this.”
In January of 2017, Stiller called Scott and pitched him on the show. Scott read the script and loved it. “It felt too good to be true,” he told me recently. “I pretty much assumed it would disappear.” It nearly did. Stiller sold the show to Apple, which was preparing to launch a new streaming service, AppleTV+, and the same qualities that had made Erickson and Stiller want Scott—the sense that he could be anyone, that he could almost be overlooked—made him a harder sell to Apple. Executives were hesitant to cast him. Stiller refused to commit to an alternative, and a year of developmental stalemate ensued. Finally, Stiller sent Scott a late-night e-mail: Apple was open to considering him, but only if Scott agreed to tape an audition for the part he’d thought he already had. Stiller feared that Scott would consider this demeaning and walk. But Scott, who is now fifty-one, spent the first fifteen years of his career as a struggling actor, and even after the success of “Parks”—and a part on the popular HBO drama “Big Little Lies” (2017)—he’d maintained a swallow-your-pride mind-set. When Scott read Stiller’s e-mail, he was in a rental trailer in Atlanta, completing a shoot as the host of a short-lived ABC game show called “Don’t.” Scott said, “I remember sitting there thinking, Am I in any position to say ‘No, thanks’ to audition for probably the best pilot I’ve ever read?” He wrote back to Stiller “in, like, five seconds,” and after reading for the part he secured the job.
“Severance” premièred in February of 2022, to wide acclaim. Amid a glut of bloated, forgettable streaming shows, the series stood out for its amusingly stilted tone and retrofuturistic mise en scène, and for the psychological dimensions of its cryptic puzzle-box structure. In this magazine, Naomi Fry called it “sci-fi for the soul.” At a time when the pandemic was prompting people to interrogate their relationships to their workplaces, the show had a fortuitous claim to the Zeitgeist. In the Times, James Poniewozik wrote that it might be “the first great TV show of the Great Resignation.” (Lumon’s sleek office looked like a cross between a mid-century library and an Apple store, and there was a piquant irony in a tech giant producing a show that lampoons corporate surveillance.) The ensemble cast included veteran stars, among them John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and Patricia Arquette, as the viperous severed-floor boss. But Scott’s subtly humane performance as Mark was what Stiller calls the “beating heart” of the story. In 2022, Scott received his first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Scott is temperamentally resistant to admitting he’s had success. When I first met him, for lunch at a hipster pizza place in L.A.’s Studio City, in November, two months before the première of “Severance” Season 2, he told me that he still worries he’s “not very good” as an actor. “And that’s not in a showy way, like how ‘impostor syndrome’ has become this buzzword now and most people are using it to humblebrag,” he added. In person, as in some of his best-known roles, he speaks with a deadpan delivery that can seem self-protective, a ward against humiliation. When I asked him the secret to achieving his impressive hair volume, he answered flatly: “Propecia.” His style is haute dadcore—slim-cut khakis, waxed field jackets, pristine sneakers. Last summer, after he turned fifty, he bought an electric Porsche Taycan, then fretted that it made him look like a middle-aged cliché. (Whether he wanted to show off the car or just his nice-guy bona fides, he offered to drive me to my friend’s house after lunch.) He described the lead-up to “Severance” Season 1, when billboards featuring his face popped up all over Los Angeles, as one of the most stressful periods of his life. Every time he comes out with a new project, he told me, “my default position is to think it will either make zero noise or be embarrassing.” Weeks later, worried that complaining about being on billboards sounded “so gross,” he added, “The thing is, I live daily with the fear of anyone thinking I think I’m great.”
Ben from “Parks and Recreation” is an incorrigible pop-culture nerd, whose passions include nineties indie rock and Batman movies, complicated board games and fantasy series. In one scene that has become an Internet meme, an unemployed Ben spends three weeks making a three-second Claymation music video. When his close friend, played by Rob Lowe, suggests that he might be depressed, Ben brandishes a clumsy clay figurine of his likeness and asks, “Do you think a depressed person could make this?”
Ben’s interests and fixational tendencies were based partly on Scott’s. For the past decade, Scott has had a side gig as the co-host, with the comedian Scott Aukerman, of a popular music podcast, on which they (“Scott and Scott”) analyze the discographies of their favorite bands, one album at a time. The seasons have aggressively goofy names—“U Talkin’ U2 to Me?,” “U Springin’ Springsteen on My Bean?,” and the forthcoming “U Talkin’ Billy Joel 2 My E-Hole?”—but, as Jesse David Fox, who covers comedy for Vulture, put it to me, the humor of the show stems from Scott’s ability to “idle in neutral.” Fox added, “He’s a dude who loves this normie music, and he is unafraid to sound really, really boring or basic about it.” On the season “R U Talkin’ R.E.M. RE: ME?,” Scott divulged that in his R.E.M.-obsessed youth he’d been an extra in the music video for the band’s song “Drive.” In the time since, he’d scrolled through the video repeatedly, frame by frame, but could never find himself. A podcast listener trawled the footage and finally spotted him, beaming upward as Michael Stipe crowd-surfs overhead.
Scott grew up, in Santa Cruz, as the third and youngest child of divorced parents. He was what he described as a “chubby kid” who was bullied for his weight at school. He lived mostly with his mom, Anne, an artist and a special-education teacher, who didn’t own a television. But when Scott was nine years old his dad, Dougald, a biology professor at a community college, gave him a portable black-and-white TV set. Scott would watch shows at night in his bedroom—“The Twilight Zone,” “Late Night with David Letterman.” (“I found something so comforting in that dry, sardonic Midwestern stance,” he recalled.) After school, he’d loiter at a local video store, “reading the backs of the VHS boxes,” and he cultivated a budding identity as a film connoisseur. In high school, he hung a photograph of Martin Scorsese in his locker. After seeing Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” he grew a goatee and wore a Knicks hat for an entire year.
Scott lost his baby weight and made the water-polo team—which, in Santa Cruz, he told me, was more socially advantageous than playing football. During his sophomore year, a drama teacher caught him peeking into the school theatre and encouraged him to try out for a play. He was loath to jeopardize his new shot at popularity, but he agreed, and soon became single-minded about acting. He appeared in school productions of “Blue Denim” and “Guys and Dolls” and let his studies slip, to the point where he was put on academic probation. As a senior, with the kind of outsized confidence endemic among high-school thespians, he declared that he was moving to Hollywood to make it as an actor.
Scott enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in Pasadena, an acting school he chose, in part, because eligible applicants needed only a 2.0 G.P.A. He dreamed of becoming what he called a “serious actor, like Robert De Niro or Al Pacino.” During his second year, Scott briefly tried using the surname Quardero, a shortened version of his mother’s Sicilian maiden name, thinking that it might lend him similar actorly gravitas. “Adam Scott,” he told me, “sounds generic and fake.” He scribbled his new autograph several times on a piece of paper, but felt “totally embarrassed” and abandoned the moniker. (Later, after he made the mistake of telling this story to his castmates on “Party Down,” they began shouting “Quardero!” any time he’d film a scene that was even “slightly sincere.”) For a Gen X-er raised on movies that skewered phonies and wannabes, the thought of being a poser was, in the end, far more offensive to his sensibilities than being potentially bland. They say a name can be a kind of destiny, and there was no use outrunning his. “I was clearly meant to play the befuddled beta male,” he said.