How Adam Scott accidentally became a horror movie star

Adam Scott grew up watching horror movies at, as he describes it, “probably a very young age.” But he never set out to work specifically in this genre. Even so, terror seemed to haunt him from the beginning. It was his first major film role Hellraiser IV In 1996. “It wasn’t because I was Hellraiser “I was impressed. It was because it was the job I got,” he says. Later, he took the starring role in… Krampus Not because it was horror, but because it evoked the 80s movies he grew up with, e.g evil spirit and at. It may not have been intentional, but he has steadily built a strong body of work in the genre, including groundbreaking ones An often terrifying sci-fi film to cut.

More recently, he served as the leader of… to rulean Irish horror film produced by Strangeness Director Damian McCarthy. Again, though, it wasn’t the genre that attracted him to the project. “I was drawn to it mostly because of the character and the story,” Lee said. “The fact that it was a horror movie was kind of secondary.”

to rule Opening in theaters May 1, Scott plays a novelist named Om who ventures to a quaint hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. It’s the kind of secluded place where goats climb on cars in the parking lot and the basement is almost certainly haunted. Om starts out as a fool struggling with an emotionally difficult mission, but as the film progresses and we learn more about why he is the way he is and the history of the hotel, his story becomes more complex. And that’s the element that really attracted Scott to the film.

“It’s kind of the opposite of the arc of most horror films,” he says. “Usually the character starts out fairly innocent and then becomes tough, and that character softens over the course of the film, and he learns that it might be worth saving himself and getting on with life.”

Outside of the character, what most interested Scott was working with McCarthy. He’s a big fan of Strangenessand in particular the way the film manages to instill a very special kind of terror into inanimate objects. “I didn’t know how he did it,” Scott recalls. “I really wanted to work with him, in some way, to see how he did it.” But this element of to rule It also presented one of the film’s biggest challenges for Scott. Much of the film takes place in the hotel’s honeymoon suite, which is a dingy, ugly space. Om finds himself trapped there alone. For an actor who often plays the straight man, Scott had to learn how to act largely alone for a period lasting several weeks.

“I really depend on the other actors,” he says. “You usually find the tone and tenor of the scene with the other actor or actors, where you’re all bouncing off each other. So it was a little daunting. It felt like I was going to play tennis by myself. But the room itself, I really started to act like another character. I always thought it was ridiculous when people would say, ‘Oh yeah, well, New York is the seventh character in our story.’ I always laughed at that. But I was here in this room, and I was really interacting with this room as if it were another character.”

He describes the set as dark and unsettling, a kind of space where he was “constantly discovering strange, creepy little details” that made it “easy to go to that place where he felt scared and claustrophobic.” In contrast, he describes working with McCarthy as the exact opposite experience.

“He’s had staff that have worked with him for a long time, and they trust him implicitly, and he trusts them,” Scott says of McCarthy. “It was fun all around. And we were in the Irish countryside, in Skibbereen in West Cork, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. He took these really horrific ideas and put them together in a really relaxed environment.”

to rule It helps solidify Scott’s place in the genre, and he’s part of a growing list of people working in comedy who have expanded their scope to include horror. (See also: The new comedy-horror hybrid Widow’s Bay On Apple TV.) And for Scott, there are clear connections between genres, which may be why he continues to gravitate toward horror despite being known for his work in comedies.

“When you’re really laughing or when you’re really scared, there’s nothing you can do about it when it actually happens,” he says. “In both genres, you try to create tension and break that tension with fear or laughter, and you try to create a certain tone and atmosphere that serves the joke or the scary moment. I think there are a lot of similarities with the two.”