The One Dramatic Role That Helped Adam Scott Land Severance

If you're a longtime fan of Adam Scott, you probably know him best for his comedic roles. Think of his douchey "Step Brothers" character Derek, or his hilariously awful Bad Place demon from "The Good Place," or his exasperated struggling actor Henry Pollard on "Party Down" – or, most famously, his lovable but goofy Ben Wyatt on NBC's beloved sitcom "Parks and Recreation." So how did this funny guy end up starring in one of TV's biggest dramas? Specifically, "Severance," the massively successful and critically adored Apple TV+ drama spearheaded by Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller.

I should get one thing out of the way here, which is that "Severance" is, at times, very funny. Even in its season 2 finale "Cold Harbor," Scott's character Mark S. gets some genuinely hilarious moments, including one where he's confusedly waving a gun at a freaked-out Sandra Bernhard. Still, the show is much more serious than a lot of Scott's previous projects. For example, nobody in "Severance" is ever forced to sing "Sweet Child O' Mine" in perfect harmony, as Derek's family is ordered to do by the patriarch in "Step Brothers" (though, based on how wild and weird Severance can be, I suppose we can't fully rule that out). So, with all of this in mind, how did Scott end up working on "Severance"?

In a 2022 interview with The Guardian, Scott opened up about booking the role of Mark S., a man so consumed by grief for his late wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) that he agrees to a "severance" procedure where his "innie" goes to work each day at Lumon Industries, completely separated from his "outie" who lives in the real world. Talking about many of the roles I mentioned above, Scott said he did worry he was limiting himself as a performer. "The material is all in this one sphere, this one persona," Scott said of playing somewhat similar characters. "And most of what I was seeing come across my desk was another befuddled beta male."

"But I fought really hard to get the role in 'Big Little Lies,'" Scott revealed, referencing his performance in the HBO miniseries that ultimately got a sophomore season. "And that really helped to stretch myself and zero in on more dramatic stuff." 

Based on Liane Moriarty's hit novel of the same name, "Big Little Lies" focuses on a group of wealthy but troubled women in Monterey, California (marking a departure from the source material, which is set in a rich coastal enclave of Australia). Reese Witherspoon's high-maintenance, strong-willed Madeline McKenzie is one of the show's central characters, but it becomes clear that her household wouldn't run without her husband Ed, played by Adam Scott. Ed is Madeline's second husband, and she shares a daughter, Abigail (Kathryn Newton), with her ex-husband Nathan (James Tupper). (Ed and Madeline also have a headstrong younger daughter named Chloe, played by Darby Camp.) To say Ed puts up with a lot where Madeline is concerned is an understatement, and if you haven't watched "Big Little Lies" yet, I'm not going to spoil anything here except to say that Scott is very, very good as Ed!

Speaking to Vulture in 2017, Scott said that he devoured the script of "Big Little Lies" and knew he wanted to be involved. "I had not read the book, and so I read the script over a weekend as if it were a page-turner of a novel," Scott said of the show's first season. "I had six of them. I did not have the final one, but I read them all quickly over a day and a half and just thought it had all these really rich characters and was addictive and fun, but also had this heartbreak. It's kind of a hat trick to have that, because there's this sense of fun to the whole affair, but then also there's a melancholy to it that I think we all can relate to. It's a really difficult thing to grab those two things at once. I immediately wanted to be a part of it, and I auditioned for Jean-Marc [Vallée, season 1's director, who passed away in 2021] to get the part."

Here's a little tidbit for you too: Ed's thick, luxurious beard was Scott's idea. "Yeah, the beard was my idea. I guess I can take credit for that monster," Scott shared, saying he talked showrunner David E. Kelley into the look. "Well, I grew up in Santa Cruz, which is really close to Monterey," Scott shared. "I grew up looking across the bay at Monterey, right where the show takes place. It's just a 20-minute drive. I felt like I knew him, this guy that works at home. I felt like he should have a beard and a fleece vest. And Jean-Marc was really cool and let me grow the beard. So there it is." 

Scott reprised his role in the show's (wholly underwhelming) second season, and now, "Big Little Lies" seems to be over for good ... leaving Scott free to star in "Severance" for as long as it runs. Clearly, "Big Little Lies" did pave the way for Scott to book something as ambitiously dramatic as "Severance."

In that 2022 interview with The Guardian, Adam Scott said that when he started working on "Severance," the experience was intensely lonely thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic ... and he brought that into his work. "We started shooting in the midst of lockdown and the pre-vaccine pandemic," Scott recalled. 

"I plopped down in New York, leaving my wife and kids in Los Angeles, and because of the intense quarantine laws it was impossible to go back and forth. So for three or four months I could only see them on FaceTime. Also, Mark is grieving his wife and I was grieving my mom, who died a few months before filming. I thought I'd gone through the grieving process, but then I suddenly found myself without my family to cushion the blow. I was either eating and sleeping alone or I was working under the fluorescent lights at Lumon. So that sense of isolation really paralleled my own life. It was a real thing I was feeling and the right place — maybe the only place — to put it was into the show."

Having watched all of Scott's performance on "Severance" thus far, I have to say that, while I'm sorry Scott was experiencing similar feelings to Mark while he started filming, his performance is nothing short of extraordinary. In the aforementioned "Cold Harbor," we build to a point where Mark's "innie" and "outie" have to have an argument via camcorder, and the fact that Scott manages to sell both sides of this argument is genuinely insane (in a good way). Scott will, if there's any justice in the world, be the one to beat at the 2025 Emmys for his lead performance on "Severance," and he can apparently thank "Big Little Lies" and his big little beard for that.

"Severance" is streaming now on Apple TV+.