How Adam Scott became an accidental horror movie star

Adam Scott grew up watching horror movies at, as he describes it, “probably too young” an age. But he never set out to work specifically in the genre. Even still, horror seemed to follow him around from the very beginning. His first major film role was in Hellraiser IV in 1996. “It wasn’t because I was a Hellraiser fan,” he says. “It was because it was the job I got.” Later, he took a starring role in Krampus not because it was horror, but because it evoked the kinds of ’80s movies he grew up with, like Poltergeist and E.T. It may not have been intentional, but he’s steadily built up a solid body of work in the genre, including leading the often terrifying sci-fi thriller Severance.

Most recently, he served as the lead in Hokum, an Irish horror movie from Oddity director Damian McCarthy. Again, though, it wasn’t the genre that lured him to the project. “I was mostly attracted to it for the character and the story,” he tells me. “The fact that it was a horror movie was kind of secondary.”

Hokum opens in theaters on May 1st, and Scott plays a novelist named Ohm who ventures to a quaint hotel in Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes. It’s the kind of tucked-away place where goats climb on cars in the parking lot and the basement is almost definitely haunted. Ohm starts out as an asshole struggling with an emotionally difficult task, but as the film progresses and we learn more about both why he is that way and the history of the hotel, his story becomes much more complex. And it’s that element that really attracted Scott to the movie.

“It’s kind of the opposite of the arc in most horror movies,” he says. “Usually a character starts out somewhat innocent and becomes hardened, and this character softens over the course of the movie, and he learns that it might be worth it to save himself and continue living.”

Outside of the character, what interested Scott most was working with McCarthy. He’s a big fan of Oddity, and in particular the way the movie was able to infuse inanimate objects with a very particular kind of terror. “I didn’t know how he did it,” Scott recalls. “I really wanted to work with him to, in one way, find out how he did that.” But that element of Hokum also provided one of the film’s biggest challenges for Scott. A large chunk of the movie takes place in the hotel’s honeymoon suite, which is a dingy, grotesque space. And Ohm finds himself trapped there all alone. For an actor who often plays the straight man, Scott had to learn how to act largely solo for a stretch that lasted several weeks.

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

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

“He has a crew he’s worked with for a long time, and they trust him implicitly, and he them,” Scott says of McCarthy. “It was just pleasant all around. And we were out in the Irish countryside, in Skibbereen in West Cork, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. He takes these really terrifying ideas and puts them together in a really relaxed environment.”

Hokum helps further 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 horror. (See also: the new comedy-horror hybrid Widow’s Bay on Apple TV.) And for Scott, there are clear connections between the genres, which might be why he keeps drifting toward horror despite being best known for his work in comedy.

“When you’re really laughing or when you’re really frightened, there’s nothing you can do about it when it’s actually happening,” he says. “In both [genres] you’re trying to create tension and break that tension with a scare or a laugh, and trying to create a particular tone and atmosphere that serves the joke or the frightening moment. I think there are a lot of parallels with the two.”