Adam Scott Doesn’t Think You Could Make Parks & Recreation Today

4 min readYes, Adam Scott knows the ending of Severance. No, you’re not going to get it out of him. In a new episode of What I’ve Learned, Esquire editor-in-chief Michael Sebastian learns that the film and TV star, whose career spans over thirty years, knows exactly how the Apple TV hit series will end.Naturally, Scott is keeping it close to the chest. And short of an injection with truth serum, he will not spill the beans. “I’m pretty much a steel—uh, steel lock? Steel cage?” he says. After both Scott and Sebastian spend forty-five seconds of trying to find the right metaphor, they settle for “safe.” “I’m a safe,” Scott jokes.But Scott is more than happy to open up about his other work. After breaking out in a supporting role in the 2008 comedy Step Brothers, he has enjoyed a constant presence across TV. His résumé includes shows like the cult favorite Party Down and the network hit Parks & Recreation, and films like Friends with Kids, Hokum, and the new Netflix movie The Whisper Man with Robert De Niro. He’s also married now with kids, and got to be one of the thousands in attendance at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding in Madison Square Garden.You can watch Adam Scott’s appearance on What I’ve Learned below.It wasn’t an easy road for Adam Scott. First he tells Sebastian how he tried “Adam Qordero” as a stage name—inspired by his mother’s Sicilian background—as a nod to Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. “I was going to be the third in the lineage of very serious Sicilian actors. I made the mistake of telling that story to my fellow cast members on Party Down years later ... and then every single time anything remotely sincere would happen on the show, everyone would be like, ‘Oh shit, Qordero’s showing up.’”After working one day at Johnny Rockets, which Scott quit after learning he’d have to sing and dance on the job, he auditioned for The Office. He lost out on the part of Jim Halpert to John Krasinski. When Sebastian asks him what went wrong in his audition, Scott simply responds, “Probably everything.”He adds, “I luckily got Parks & Rec years later, and I feel The Office would not be nearly as good with anyone other than Krasinski playing that. You can’t imagine anyone else. But I think I wanted it too badly. I think that was a big issue of mine early on, is that I was leaning in really hard because I needed a job so badly. It wasn’t until later, when I kind of took my foot off the gas a little bit, and was a little more confident, that things started falling into place.”The rest of the conversation spans Scott’s rise to Hollywood fame that has lent him the image of someone who, as The New Yorker once put it, “straddles the line between hunky and nondescript.” Scott’s career took off after he worked opposite Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers, in which Scott says he learned how to do improvisational comedy.He then worked with Amy Poehler on Parks & Recreation. When Sebastian asks him if a version of the beloved comedy could exist in today’s political climate, Scott says it’s unlikely. “I don't know if that's possible in this era,” Scott notes. “I feel like anyone in their right mind making a show about government in the Trump era—I don’t know if it could be reflective at all of today’s world and be as optimistic as Parks was. Unless it’s a period piece.”In 2022, Adam Scott starred in Severance, the Apple TV phenomenon about an eerie workplace where employees are “severed” from their personal lives. On the show’s musings about the elusive work-life balance, Scott—who admits he’s never had a regular office job—says he has none. “I have no work-life balance. A life in show business is hard because you never know what’s going to work or not. So you get in as much as possible, hoping one will click. So as far as knowing when to just relax and enjoy your time or take time off, you’re afraid you’re gonna miss something.”Right now, Scott is on the promotional tour for The Whisper Man, a new Netflix movie based on the novel by Alex North. Scott stars as a writer whose son is abducted in their new town—a place living in fear of a serial killer called the Whisper Man. Both Robert De Niro and Michelle Monaghan star as detectives working on the case.Working with De Niro was obviously a full-circle moment for Adam Scott, even beyond his attempted “Adam Qordero” stage name. “The thing that was really terrific was watching how hard he works, how he’s still trying to figure it out. We would do a take, and he’d be like, ‘Can I get one more? Let me try this.’ I’m like, ‘Oh my god. He’s still figuring it out. He’s still trying to get it right. He got it right. But it’s sort of a never-ending mystery. That’s part of the thing I do love about acting. It never stops.”