If you’re looking for an everyman, Adam Scott’s the brand leader – although you may have to look hard. He tends to blend with the scenery. At the age of 49, he’s been an actor for decades, serving as a wired, anxious mainstay on shows such as Parks and Recreation and Big Little Lies. But he likes to recall how he made his first screen appearance as an extra in the video for the REM song Drive, then spent the next 25 years trying to locate his face in the crowd. The man’s a hidden treasure; sometimes even hidden from himself. “I started out doing background work in the early 90s,” he says, as if this explains everything. “After that, I got little two-line jobs on ER, Boy Meets World, stuff like that. But I still have the brain of the person I was. I’m still carrying the same self-doubt, the same sense of rabid insecurity.” In the acclaimed Apple TV+ series Severance, Scott landed a leading role and ran with it. He stars as Mark S, the office drone who’s been fitted with a microchipped NDA that separates his home life from his work persona. It’s been the best gig of his life, he says. The most demanding one, too. “I certainly felt the weight and the pressure to make sure the show didn’t crash. Because it’s one of the only times I’ve been in something where, if I sucked, the whole thing wouldn’t work.” He laughs mirthlessly. “Other times I can suck and it wouldn’t make much difference.” The paradox here is that Mark’s a cog-in-the-machine, a corporate spear-carrier, the lowly widower who jumps between the leafy suburbia of his domestic sphere and the sterile corridors of his office space. Inside sinister Lumon Industries, the work PCs all lack an escape key while a mysterious inner room contains a number of bleating white goats. “They’re not ready,” Mark’s told – which leaves him and us none the wiser. Scott played the lead, but he should have charged double. That’s because he’s Work Mark and Home Mark, the “innie” and the “outie”, estranged halves of the divided self. The notion of severance is a little like acting, he says. “The line can be blurry because it’s the same person, I guess. Same guy, different hats. The people are separate but what one does affects the other.” A lesser show might have struggled to honour its high-concept premise. Severance handled it to perfection, deepening and darkening with each fresh twist and turn. Created by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, it gave us an existential office sitcom by way of Jean-Paul Sartre and rustled up a dystopian world just a shuffle-step from our own. The way Scott sees it, Severance is a Covid drama in all but name. Its themes of isolation and bereavement, moreover, crept uncomfortably close to home. “We started shooting in the midst of lockdown and the pre-vaccine pandemic,” he says. “I plopped down in New York, leaving my wife and kids in Los Angeles, and because of the intense quarantine laws it was impossible to go back and forth. So for three or four months I could only see them on FaceTime. Also, Mark is grieving his wife and I was grieving my mom, who died a few months before filming. I thought I’d gone through the grieving process, but then I suddenly found myself without my family to cushion the blow. I was either eating and sleeping alone or I was working under the fluorescent lights at Lumon. So that sense of isolation really paralleled my own life. It was a real thing I was feeling and the right place – maybe the only place – to put it was into the show.” He ought to be thankful he wasn’t making a knockabout comedy. “Yeah, right,” he says, snorting. “Except maybe that would have helped in a completely different way.” Comedy, for years, was the man’s natural terrain. Scott has written, directed, produced and performed. He cropped up as the smug younger sibling in Adam McKay’s Step Brothers; a demon in The Good Place; sad-sack Ben Wyatt in the lovely Parks and Recreation. And all of that was great, he says. “Except that then the material is all in this one sphere, this one persona. And most of what I was seeing come across my desk was another befuddled beta male.” It took 2017’s Emmy award-winning Big Little Lies to move the dial. Scott’s role as Ed Mackenzie, the straight-arrow husband to Reese Witherspoon’s alpha-queen, installed him as the watchful eye of a domestic storm. It made a bonus of his diffidence and weaponised his self-doubt. He says he’d had so many near-misses. Probably more misses than hits, come to that. “But I fought really hard to get the role in Big Little Lies. And that really helped to stretch myself and zero in on more dramatic stuff.” Scott’s now back in New York, subletting a friend’s apartment and shooting the second series of Severance. No doubt there are numerous loose ends to tie up. The first season bowed out with Mark’s innie and outie on a collision course. It ended with a cliff-hanging revelation, plus the lingering tease of that inner room full of goats. Only the makers, one assumes, know precisely what’s going on. Still, here’s hoping for explanations, escape, maybe even a closure of sorts. Scott sympathises. He’s all too aware of the dangers. “It’s important that a story doesn’t become a series of questions with no answers. Or that it gives answers that feel as if they were made up on the spot.” He laughs. “So yeah, of course, nobody wants that. But what I do know is that Severance really isn’t that kind of show. There is a reason for everything – even the room full of goats.”