by Natasha Wolff | August 24, 2026 2:57 pm
When Adam Scott was a teenager growing up in Santa Cruz, California, he was obsessed with movies. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro movies in particular. Sure, he was on the swim team, played water polo and acted in school theater, but, unlike his friends, Scott kept pictures of the actor from Raging Bull, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver in his locker at school.
“It’s all I really cared about,” says Scott, in a conversation on a day off from filming his hit Apple TV series Severance. “De Niro is so fundamental to why I wanted to be an actor in the first place, to what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”
So, to play opposite the 83-year-old De Niro—as his estranged son, no less—in the new Netflix film The Whisper Man[1], well, for the 53-year-old Scott, it was a career highlight.
“Being there on set with him was so special, really inspiring to see him working so hard, to make it as good as it could possibly be,” says Scott, who found De Niro to be a “sweet person and a cool guy.”
Scott didn’t talk about his longtime admiration for De Niro during their days on set together in New Jersey. “No, no, no, no way,” says Scott. “I don’t know how that would help us. I wouldn’t want to cheapen anything and make him uncomfortable. I didn’t want to bring that element into it. Maybe it would embarrass him. Still, if you’re working with someone who’s fundamental to why you’re doing what you’re doing, you’re going to learn from that person. It was incredible.”
Based on the novel by Alex North and directed by James Ashcroft, The Whisper Man has shades of Silence of the Lambs. Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a widowed crime writer who moves to a quiet town only for his son to be abducted. Michelle Monaghan is the detective assigned to the case. De Niro plays Scott’s father, a retired police detective with the key to unlocking the identity of a mysterious serial killer, the so-called “Whisper Man.”
Scott, who remains an unequivocal movie buff—he watched Raiders of the Lost Ark four times during the week before our interview—was a big fan of Ashcroft’s 2021 film Coming Home in the Dark and reached out to the filmmaker. “I’d watched it a couple of times, and I just had to talk to him,” Scott says. Then The Whisper Man came up. “I thought it was a really good and disturbing script, and I thought through James’ lens, it could be something really special.” Indeed, somehow Ashcroft will make you shudder the next time you stir a pot of macaroni and cheese.
“I was a fan of Adam’s comedic work over the years,” says Ashcroft. “It’s often the case that an actor with strong comedic instincts has equally strong dramatic intuitions. I think viewers will relish seeing Adam continue to flex those dramatic muscles in this film.”
Of course, there was the added bonus of getting to work with his idol, De Niro. “Well, that’s a lifelong thing, at least for this actor,” Scott says.
“We definitely bonded over getting over to work with Bob,” explains Monaghan. “We have immense respect for him, and, I think, on Day One, we both looked at each other in disbelief and said, ‘Can you believe we’re here?’ I’m so grateful to have shared that experience with Adam, a wonderful person who was just as appreciative and awestruck as I was. Adam is simply who he is. Pure gold. No pretense.”
Despite the macabre subject matter, “the tone on set was light, and it was a fun project to work on,” Scott recalls. “Hopefully, no matter what you’re making, it can be a fun experience and you try not to get weighed down by what’s serious or scary.
Scott always intended to work in drama. “In acting school, I was dead set on being a serious actor. That’s always what I saw for myself, and when I first started out, I took myself very seriously,” he explains. But a role in the 2008 comedy Step Brothers changed that. “I watched Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly and Adam McKay. They’d throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. That was a revolutionary way of working for me—the improvisation and the lack of rules. I really connected with that, and I felt that I never wanted to go back,” Scott recalls.
Shortly afterward, he appeared in the sitcoms Party Down and Parks and Recreation, finding traction in the world of funny. “That’s when I finally realized, This is what a career is. I found a certain freedom in my work. There’s a lack of rules with comedy.”
Scott landed the Step Brothers role 13 years after leaving acting school, and despite the long wait for a big break, “it’s fortunate the way that it happened. If I’d gotten Scream or Scream 2 or I Know What You Did Last Summer, all of which I auditioned for when I was around 20, I wouldn’t have been able to handle the attention. I wasn’t good enough to turn it into something.”
After Parks ended, Scott strove to be considered for dramatic roles again. “I fought for Big Little Lies,” he says, securing the role of Reese Witherspoon’s husband in the 2017 HBO drama. “That really helped show that I could do something else. I doubt I would have been able to land Severance without it.”
Severance has turned out to be a phenomenon, acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. “I don’t know if we’ll ever know exactly why,” says Scott. “We knew we all loved it, but we figured it was maybe too weird.”
When the show premiered, in 2022, “we were all emerging from the pandemic, and people were reassessing their relationship to work,” says Scott. “It didn’t look or feel like anything else, but for whatever reason, it was connecting.”
It’s been some time since season two wrapped, “so we were all anxious to get back [for season three]. It’s a show that requires so much focus emotionally and physically. It’s an all-encompassing project. It’s a hyperspecific tone, and it just takes all of you to make it. It’s a huge challenge, but that’s why it’s so fun. We have a blast.”
Making Severance takes Scott away from his family in Los Angeles, his least favorite part of filming in New York. “After years of working constantly, for which I’m super grateful, it’s also important to understand the power of no, to know what it is you really want to spend your time doing and spend time with your family.” When his teenage kids with wife, producer Naomi Scott, come East, “that’s when we go out and do New York things.”
Left to his own devices, Scott spends his weekends recovering from the stress of work, which often includes watching tons of movies and television. “It’s kind of my favorite thing to do,” Scott says. “For me, an iPad is still a magical device.”
It reminds him of his teenage years when movies were “all I thought about and all I cared about.” He watched so much that he broke the VCR in his room and his dad had to buy him a new one. “It just stopped working,” Scott recalls. “I wonder if anyone’s ever worn out a VCR.”
At 16, in between bedroom film festivals, Scott played the role of 60-year-old Joe Keller in his high school’s production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Yes, it was a big reach for a teenager, and there was something silly about how seriously they all took it. Occasionally, Scott’s bald cap would fall off. But he still recalls the one performance where it all just became magical.
“I was in that place of everything clicking and all I could think was, This is what it’s supposed to be and this is all I want to do,” Scott recalls. “I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.”
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