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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne.

Adam Scott is my first guest this week. He played the Calzone-obsessed accountant turned political

consultant Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation. On Party Down, he played the failed actor turned

cater-waiter Henry, on Big Little Lies, Ed McKenzie, and in stepbrothers, the preposterously

evil, Derek. And if you're one of the many people watching the sci-fi dromedy Severance,

you also know him as that show's protagonist, Mark. It's a terrific program. Adam is great in it.

Its second season just kicked off on Apple TV Plus. When he and I talked in

2022, Severance had just wrapped its first season. In case you haven't heard it, here's the

premise. It's set mostly at a company called Lumen Industries in a department where many of the

workers have undergone a procedure called severance. When they get to

Lumen, workers have no memory of their lives outside the office. And when they leave for the day,

they remember nothing about what happened on the inside. Scott and the crew had spent much of the

most intense lockdown parts of the pandemic filming that first season. And you can feel

that isolation and disorientation in the performers on screen. When the show starts, Mark S,

played by my guest Adam, has been working at Lumen for some time. In fact, he just got a promotion.

And in this scene, he's training his first ever new recruit. Heli are.

Helly is, as you might imagine, a little disoriented. So I'll never leave here.

You'll leave at five. Well, actually, they stagger our exits. So 515. But it won't feel like it, not to this version of you anyway.

...