When Adam Scott first started filming Severance, the Apple TV show that turned into a cultural phenomenon, the actor knew he was part of something special. He’d been around long enough to recognize that the series played off his persona in workplace sitcoms like Party Down and Parks and Recreation, but it was weird and cryptic enough (What are they doing with those numbers? What’s up with the goats?) to feel unique.
What Scott and his co-stars hadn’t quite counted on was the passionate response the show generated among viewers, especially when it came to that Season Two finale. When asked if he personally gets blowback from fans over his character Mark Scout’s decision at the episode’s climax — we won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t caught up yet — he admitted that people do bring it up: “You mean, ‘Why did you — why did he — do that?’ Yeah, yeah.”
But during Scott’s stop at the Rolling Stone Studio at SXSW podcast, he said that he doesn’t mind folks being deeply invested in what happened. In fact, he’s just happy people love it. “When there’s so much stuff out there, and people have so much to choose from — we all just expected the show to come out and everyone to shrug their shoulders and move on,” Scott said. “We loved it and thought it was fun, but figured it was just this weird show that people weren’t going to necessarily pay attention to in the way that they did. So the fact that anyone has any sort of visceral feelings or opinions about it? It’s great. I enjoy it, and I love that people feel something for these characters.”
Scott also talked about filming what is arguably the finale’s standout sequence: when the “outie” and “innie” versions of his characters conduct a heated conversation via camcorder recordings. “It was hard to do, and it was also something that I was dreading the whole season, because I knew it was coming,” he said. “[Showrunner] Dan [Erickson] had told me he had this scene in mind, and as an actor, it’s the kind of thing that you dream of [getting] a chance to do. But then once it’s in front of you, you’re just like, ‘Oh, shit, I actually have to do this.’
“The script of the scene itself was being worked on right up until the moment we started shooting it,” he added. “And since I was talking to a camera, I had shot versions of both sides of the conversation in my apartment just on my phone. So we used that on the camera for me to actually react to. I was just going to try to do each line or each response as many different ways as possible, and then they did a great job of cutting it together. Because the thing that was important to all of us was not the novelty of it being the same actor doing both sides of the conversation — [it] needed to be beside the point. It’s what they say to each other and how they say it. So the novelty of it being the same actor needed to wear off quickly.”
Scott was the Parker Posey of this year’s SXSW Film Festival, showing up with not one but two high-profile projects: The Saviors, a suburban thriller co-starring Danielle Deadwyler, about a couple who rent their guest house to strangers they suspect might be terrorists; and Hokum, a horror movie about a haunted hotel that, on a scale of one to 10 The Shinings, he rates at “one thousand Shinings!”
Scott also weighed in on his album-by-album music podcast with Scott Aukerman, whether there will ever be any more Greatest Event in Television History re-creations of 1980s TV-show opening credits, and more. To watch his full Rolling Stone Studio interview, go to Rolling Stone’s YouTube channel, or just press play above.
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