Adam Scott says he's been waiting his 'whole career' for a project like Severance

For the better part of four years, Adam Scott was fervently hoping he'd get to play the lead role in Severance. And the whole time, he was pretty sure he never would.

"I just figured, somewhere along the line, someone else is going to want to do this, and this is going to slip away from me," the former Parks and Recreation star tells EW. "All along, I was just hoping that I would get to be a part of it. It sounds corny, but it really is the kind of role I've been waiting my whole career for."

It's true that Severance (premiering Friday on Apple TV+) marks a rare, and meaty, leading-man role for Scott, who stars as the series' grief-stricken, office-drone protagonist, Mark. But, as with the character and the massive corporation he works for, there were also deeper layers to the actor's enthusiasm. After first hearing about the project, "I couldn't stop thinking about it," Scott says. "It's just a fun, hooky idea, but then there are all of the possible implications of it, which is what made me continue to come back to the idea."

Indeed, the show has a premise that could power a great Black Mirror episode: employees like Mark are given the chance to undergo a procedure that quite literally separates their work life from their personal life. For eight hours a day, "severed" workers have no knowledge of their lives outside the office, while their "innies," in company parlance, go about their workday. Their "outies," meanwhile, have no idea what goes on at work, and thus no danger of bringing their work home with them.

It sounds ideal until you start considering those "implications" — and Severance does, in chilling, thought-provoking fashion. Mark, for instance, had the procedure after losing his wife in a car accident, which strikes his family as an unhealthy way to process his grief.

"Mark has made a conscious decision to not move on from it," Scott explains. "He doesn't want to heal, because I think healing would mean really saying goodbye forever, right? So rather than sit in it and feel it, he'd rather just switch off for eight to 10 hours a day."

Meanwhile, his "innie" doesn't even know what his job ("macrodata refinement") entails, and his freshly severed coworker Helly (Britt Lower) wants the procedure undone. And then there are all the questions the premise raises: "Who has control of this technology? Why are they doing it? Who would volunteer for this? Why do they have that trust in this company? What's going on in their lives?" muses Scott. "And the corporate culture of it — not only the culture within the corporation, but the corporate culture we all live in, and how these big companies are so ingrained in our daily lives now. This show is taking that a step further than where we are now — but not that much further."

Severance first implanted itself in Scott's brain in January 2017, as he recalls. While "standing in the snow" at the Sundance Film Festival, he got a call from Ben Stiller, who had encountered the pilot script by creator Dan Erickson as a submission to his production company.

"Ben called me just to tell me about this script he had read," Scott says. "I guess he thought of me for the role [of Mark], and to this day, I'm not sure why, because I'm sure he could get a giant star to do it. But I'm really touched that he stuck by me and really wanted me to play the role."

And ironically, he needn't have worried: To hear Stiller tell it, he never considered anyone else for the job.

"Adam really did jump into my mind almost immediately when I was reading the script," says Stiller, who executive produced Severance and directed six of the first season's nine episodes. "In my mind, he was the only guy to do the show with."

And he had plenty of reasons why: "There's a prototype of this regular guy who goes to work and is existing in this office ecosystem that I think Adam has [played] in different scenarios and different genres," Stiller explains, specifically name-checking Parks and Rec as an example. "And there's a certain preconception that I think some of the audience might have about him, that I thought really worked for this. Seeing him as that guy who's kind of quick-witted and nice, and you feel like you know him — I thought Adam would be the perfect guy to take that preconception and then subvert it. Mark is much more than that, because he's living that experience as his innie, but he has no idea what his outie's life is."

What's more, Stiller continues, "Adam's a very technical actor, too. He's able to adjust his performance almost by millimeters, in terms of going one way or the other. He does that really, really well."

You can see it in the way Scott talks about the role. While it's very clear for the audience which version of Mark is which — the "innie" is always in the office, after all — keeping everything straight wasn't always so simple for the actor.

"It was important to Ben and me and Dan Erickson that it's not two different characters," Scott explains. "As an actor, your first knee-jerk instinct is, this one will have a mustache and a hat with a feather in it and a limp or something. But it was really important that it be one character, one guy; it's just two different halves of one guy. One half has 40-odd years of life experience and sorrow and joy, and all of the things that go with living this full life. And then the other half is, for all intents and purposes, two and a half years old, and has all of those same feelings inside of him, but doesn't know what they are or how to name them."

Performing that duality "was always sort of a math problem more than anything," Scott continues. "I was always trying figure out the addition and subtraction of, emotionally, what was going on and how that may manifest itself physically — what this side of him has gone through and the knowledge that side of him may have, and then the lack of knowledge that the innie has, and maybe the addition of something that the outie doesn't know or understand."

On top of that, he adds, "We were also shooting the whole show at the same time, so we were jumping back and forth between episodes and between innie and outtie. We had to keep an eagle eye on where we were and what we were doing."

Based on the highly positive buzz for Severance, it's a balance he pulled off quite well. But whether or not audiences embrace the genre-bending, stubbornly mysterious show ("You're just seeing bits and pieces of the iceberg, but it's all there, and Dan has thought everything through," Scott teases), it's a project that will remain close to its star's heart.

"It's all kinds of things that, as an audience member, I love to watch," Scott says of the show. "It's science fiction, it's funny, it's dramatic. And when I finally got to read a script, that's the first thing that really popped into my mind: This is something I would reach for and want to watch."

And there's an even more personal reason, too. "When we ended up making the show, I had just had a major loss in my family," Scott recalls. "I was kind of buoyed by my wife and kids, and when I went to New York [to film Severance], I was by myself there, and that's when I really had to come to terms with it and confront the grieving process. So the show was sort of my way into coming to terms with this loss." That's an emotional connection that nothing can sever.

Watch an exclusive clip from Severance above.

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