The terrible 2004 movie Adam Scott will always be proud of: “It’s just so fucking weird”
Once you’re used to an actor being in a certain genre, it’s sometimes tough to accept them in a completely different one. There’s no way I could be scared by a horror movie starring Will Ferrell, for instance, it would be ridiculous, but Adam Scott is another matter, and it’s all down to a TV show.
That TV show would be Severance, the mind-bendingly brilliant Ben Stiller-directed series that bookended the Covid-19 pandemic and which reminded everyone of the terrors of actually going to work for a corporation in an office. Not only was Scott fantastic in it as the lead, and there’s a season three on the way, but it also served as a middle ground between his being in one of the greatest comedies of all time, Ferrell’s Step Brothers, and the kind of things he’s doing now, like Hokum.
His latest movie is a deeply scary-looking folk horror in which he plays a writer heading to a rural hotel in Ireland, clutching the ashes of his late parents in order to scatter them where they went on their honeymoon. But things do not go well for him, not well at all. The property is said to be haunted by an ancient witch, and soon, his alcoholism and fragile state of mind begin to take over.
Scott might have been a hard sell to do a movie like that before Severance because the spectre of him getting punched in the face up a treehouse by John C Reilly might have been too fresh in the memory, but actually he has taken on much more dramatic roles throughout his career, as well as the funny stuff like Parks and Rec, in which he starred for five years beginning in 2010.
Ironically, Scott actually started out in horror, with 1996’s Hellraiser: Bloodline, in fact, the fourth instalment in the Clive Barker franchise and then over the next eight years or so, he took on small roles in films and on TV before he took a part in a 2004, Ice Cube-starring motorbike movie that few people remember. He recalled the film to AV Club, explaining, “Well, I actually love Torque. I think Torque’s hilarious. It’s great if you’re stoned. It’s really weird if you’re stoned, like in a good way, but also in a, ‘What the fuck, who made this?’ way.”
An action thriller with a surprisingly large budget for the time of $40million, Torque was a movie about a biker who discovers a load of motorcycles full of crystal meth, only to run into a gangster who wants his drugs back.
Scott added, “I think it’s this weird confluence of the studio wanting to make a Fast and the Furious movie and a director who wanted to make fun of Fast and the Furious movies, and those things kind of colliding. It’s just so fucking weird, but it was fun. It was fun for me because I got to run around with a gun and drive a car. It was super-fun.”
Just as the producers spent an unusually large sum on a film that didn’t really get any promotion, it also did surprisingly well at the box office, or at least it managed to make its money back. That same year, Scott went up in the world, so to speak, and also got a part in The Aviator, the Martin Scorsese-directed Howard Hughes biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
It was definitely 2008’s Step Brothers that gave the actor his break however, and he’s appeared in a huge number of different projects since. Later this year, he has more scary fare lined up as he appears in The Whisper Man, a psychological serial killer thriller alongside Robert De Niro.
