To stay afloat and avoid disappointment, Adam Scott said he doesn’t expect big nominations. It’s a healthier frame of mind, he said, and he’s gotten used to not hearing his name called.
“I didn’t think I’d be nominated,” he said. “I was just trying to focus on everyone and go for a walk and get it out of my head.”
After learning that he received an Emmy nomination for Best Actor in the Apple TV+ drama ‘Severance’, Scott said it was an honor to be named alongside actors such as Brian Cox, nominee for ‘Succession’ and Jason Bateman, nominee. for ‘Ozark. †
Also nominated for Best Drama, Severance paints an eerie picture of workplace culture in which employees of an enigmatic, vaguely sinister company called Lumon Industries undergo a surgical procedure that separates their work memories from their personal memories in an attempt to keep company secrets confidential. to keep. Scott plays Mark Scout, who, after losing his wife, Gemma (played by Dichen Lachman), in a car accident, replaces monotonous shifts of pocket numbers in digital boxes at Lumon for proper healing.
In a phone interview on Tuesday, Scott discussed the show’s cliffhanger ending and how he used a personal loss to build his character. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Where were you when you first heard of the nomination?
I was walking the dogs when I got the call and was taken aback and just couldn’t be more flattered and honored. It was a unique feeling to say the least.
Why do you think the show was so successful?
It’s a good question because when we were making it, if not daily, we would stop and look at each other and just say, “This is real [expletive] foreign. Is anyone going to get in touch with it?” We didn’t know, and then we just shrugged and put our heads down and kept going.
What were the most challenging scenes for you to film?
I went through a grieving process because my mother had passed away before I went to New York. I walked into that apartment and realized that I wasn’t done grieving yet, because my family was shaking me a little bit about this at home. And that’s what love is for in many ways, to get you through such a process, and we got locked up in Los Angeles, so I was able to kind of make it through. But when I arrived in New York six months later, I closed the door and I was alone and I immediately realized that I was not done dealing with this loss. The show was there, and so I worked my grief through the show.
What does “Severance” hope to learn about how to deal with grief?
For outtie Mark, that was what the season was about: grief, and how does he deal with it? And is is he going to handle it? Or does he keep pushing it away? And I asked myself the same question. So I decided to deal with it, but deal with it with Mark.
There’s a scene where I’m on the side of the road where my wife was in a car accident on the show, and we happened to shoot that scene on the one year anniversary of my mom’s passing. It was just pure coincidence. But I carried it with me all day and tried not to get into it. It really helped me with my grieving process.
What does the show want to tell viewers about how to manage what’s happening at work and at home, especially during a pandemic where many people had to work remotely?
Work is something you do to achieve something. A job is a place you go, if you can define it that way, and I think people started re-evaluating their relationship with those things. I think we all found that home and your life, and your life at work, all merged into one thing.
How did the cast and director Ben Stiller compose the final moments of the season finale?
The moment I called Mrs Selvig ‘Mrs. Cobel” by accident – while we were shooting I remember saying to Patricia: [Arquette] and Ben: “Okay if we have them, if they care at this point in the last episode, if we put the breadcrumbs right, this moment is going to be so much fun and so big.”
But that’s a delicate process, to get to the point where it actually has an impact. It’s not easy to get it all together so that it actually happens. It might as well be a shrug if you’re not involved with the characters or the story or whatever. So it’s wonderful to hear people throw things at their televisions or get up and walk out of the room or just yell. We really had no idea if anyone would care.