Adam Scott on Personal Connection With 'Severance' Character: “I'm Still So Grateful That It Was There for Me”

The star reveals how he found his way into playing a character who is split in two, and how the show helped him process his own grief.

Adam Scott on Personal Connection With ‘Severance’ Character: “I’m Still So Grateful That It Was There for Me”

This feature was produced and curated by The Hollywood Reporter editors and is presented by Apple TV+.

On Apple TV+’s drama series Severance, Adam Scott stars as Mark, a mid-level employee at the mysterious Lumon Corporation who, along with his colleagues, has undergone a surgical procedure that separates their home and work personalities in two, keeping the “innies” — as they’re known in the office — in the dark as to whom their “outies” are outside of work. Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, Severance follows Mark and his co-workers as they slowly learn more about the company and attempt to align their innie and outie personas under the always-watching powers that be who wish to keep their employees severed for good.

Scott joined THR awards editor Tyler Coates for a one-on-one conversation as part of THR’s “Closer Look” series. (Scott and his co-stars Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry and Tramell Tillman previously joined Stiller, Erickson and cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné for a larger conversation about the Apple TV+ thriller.)

While Severance sees all of Lumon’s employees split into two personas, it’s Scott’s character Mark whom the audience sees both inside and outside the confines of Lumon’s corporate HQ. That posed an immediate challenge for Scott, requiring him to play, in essence, two separate characters throughout Severance’s ten episodes. “The first instinct for me, and for a lot of actors I would imagine, was to be like, ‘Let’s have one of them have beret and a limp — that could be really fun,’ ” says Scott, noting that Stiller and Erickson settled on something less visually obvious. “It was really important to Dan, Ben and I that it feel like the same guy. Because it is the same person, we’re just seeing different parts of his life, almost different halves of the same person. It’s just that one has 40-some odd years of life experience: sorrow, happiness and all of the things that go along with a full life. And the other one is, for all intents and purposes, like two and a half years old.”

One aspect of the show that helped Scott transition between characters was the Lumon elevator — which is when Severance’s audience sees the outies transition to innies and vice versa. “It ended up really kind of distilling the two characters down for me,” Scott says of the elevator sequences. “I would have to switch between one to the other really fast, obviously. And it was more of an internal shift than anything. Trying to figure out how to let it be that without feeling like I had to do some big, physical morphing or transformation, really [distilled] it down to the internal differences between these two.”

As for Mark’s outie, whom we learn has undergone the severance procedure after the death of his wife as a presumably easy way to get over his grief, the character’s motivations were easy for Scott to understand. “I was going through a grieving process in my life,” Scott reveals. “My mother had died early on in the pandemic, and I had been here at home with my wife and my kids, [which] kind of cushioned the blow. A few months later found myself in New York by myself [filming the show] and realized I had a lot of grieving to do, but also a lot of processing to do.”

For Scott, Severance was more than an ordinary job. “The show was right there in front of me,” he says. “I was processing it on my own and grieving on my own, but also processing and grieving through the show. I’m still so grateful that it was there for me in a way, because I was figuring it out, both on screen and off, as we were shooting.”