Hi, everyone, and thank you for tuning in to the 596th episode of the Hollywood Reporter's Awards Chatter podcast.

I'm the host, Scott Feinberg, and my guest today is a gifted and magnetic screen actor, who, over the course of some 30 years in the business,

has enjoyed his greatest success on television, most notably on Stars' Party Down, from 2009

through 2010, NBC's Parks and Recreation from 2010 through 2015, HBO's Big Little

Lives from 2017 through 2019, and since 2022, on two seasons of Apple TV Plus's Severance, on which he plays Mark, a history professor grieving the death of his wife, who opts to undergo a groundbreaking procedure called Severance that results in a total mental

separation between one's home and work lives, resulting in any and outy versions of oneself.

Adam Scott

Back in 2002, the first season of Severance was recognized with 14 Emmy nominations,

including Best Actor in a Drama Series for Scott

and Best Drama Series, for which Scott, as a producer of the show, was also personally in the running.

Last month, the show's second season, which the New York Times recently described as the most

ambitious, batty, and all-out pleasurable show on TV, was recognized with a field-leading

27 Emmy nominations, including those same two. But this time, unlike last time, it is the odds-on

favorite to prevail in both of those categories, which would make Scott an Emmy winner for the

first time. Over the course of a conversation in the offices of Get in Rad Productions,

the production company that Scott runs with his wife Naomi,

on the Radford Studio Center lot,

just a few steps from the soundstage on which he shot Parks and Rec,

the 52-year-old and I discussed his slow evolution from starving actor

to scene-stealer in the Judd-Apato

films knocked up in Stepbrothers to TV stalwart, how his relationship with Ben Stiller developed

from 2013's The Secret Life of Walter Middy, which Stiller directed and starred in, and in which

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