How Adam Scott became a horror movie star by accident

Adam Scott grew up watching horror movies, as he puts it, “probably at a very young age.” But he did not start working mainly in the music genre. Even so, fear seemed to follow him from the start. His first role in the film was in Hellraiser IV in 1996. “It was not because I was a Hellraiser fan,” he says. “It was because it was the job I received. After that, he took part in the game Krampus not because it was scary, but because it introduced the kinds of 80s movies that you grew up with, like Poltergeist and ET. It may not have been intentional, but he has been building a strong body of work in the genre, including directing. often scary sci-fi To quit.

Recently, he served as a leader HokumIrish based horror film Unusual director Damian McCarthy. Again, it is not the race that attracted him to start this job. “I was really drawn to the culture and the story,” he tells me. “The fact that it was a horror movie was kind of secondary.”

Hokum opens in theaters on May 1, and Scott plays a novelist named Ohm who goes to a luxury hotel in Ireland to scatter his parents’ ashes. It’s a remote place where goats ride cars in parking lots and basements are scarce. Ohm starts out like a donkey struggling with a difficult job, but as the film progresses and we learn more about why he is like this and the history of the hotel, his story becomes more complex. And that’s what drew Scott to the movie.

“It’s different from what happens in most horror movies,” he says. “A lot of times a person starts out innocent and becomes stubborn, and this person softens during the course of the film, and learns that it would be better to save himself and go on living.”

Outside of the character, Scott’s favorite thing was working with McCarthy. He is very passionate Unusualand especially how the film was able to get involved in inanimate objects and horrors of a certain kind. “I didn’t know how he did it,” Scott recalls. “I really wanted to work with him to, in a way, find out how he did it.” But the thing about Hokum it also provided one of the film’s biggest challenges for Scott. The main part of the movie takes place in the honeymoon suite of the hotel, which is a dark, mysterious place. And Ohm finds himself trapped there alone. For an actor who usually plays a straight man, Scott had to learn to act alone for a long time that lasted several weeks.

“I rely a lot on other actors,” he said. So it was a little scary. It looked like I was playing tennis by myself. But the room really started to have a different character. I’ve always thought it was silly when people would say, ‘Oh, yes, our seventh story in New York. I always laughed at that. But I was in this room, and I was interacting with this room as if it were another person.”

He explains that the place was dark and stagnant, like a place where he was always “finding strange, scary little things” that made it “easy to go to a place of fear and claustrophobia.” In contrast, he explains that working with McCarthy was completely different.

“He has a team that he’s worked with for a long time, and they trust him completely, and they trust them,” Scott says of McCarthy. We were in the Irish countryside, Skibbereen in West Cork, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Hokum it helps solidify Scott’s place in the genre, and he’s one of a handful of comedians who have increased their numbers at an alarming rate. (See also: new comedy-horror hybrid Widow’s Bay on Apple TVAnd for Scott, there’s a clear connection between these genres, which may be why he’s always looked so creepy despite being better known for his comedic work.

He said: “When you’re really laughing or when you’re scared, there’s nothing you can do when it’s really happening. “In both types (types) you’re trying to create conflict and resolve this conflict with fear or laughter, and you’re trying to create a tone that makes a joke or a scary moment. I think there are a lot of similarities between the two.