Adam Scott

Adam Scott spent roughly fifteen years as a face in other people's films before anyone built anything around him. He is briefly in Star Trek: First Contact in 1996, briefly in The Aviator, briefly in Knocked Up. The break came from television, and specifically from playing men whose politeness is a containment strategy.

Party Down supplied the template: a failed actor working catering, too self-aware to be happy. Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation warmed it into something else, a state auditor and hopeless nerd whose defining trait is total sincerity, and the show earned him two Critics' Choice nominations. In between came Step Brothers, where he plays the successful younger brother as a genuine monster, conducting his family through a car singalong under implied threat. That performance is the key to all of it: he is exceptionally good at people who believe that behaving correctly entitles them to something.

Severance is the culmination and the surprise. As Mark Scout he plays grief with the volume almost entirely down, a man who has had his working day surgically removed from his memory, and the part requires him to run two versions of the same person who have never met. It has brought four Primetime Emmy nominations, two for acting and two as a producer, plus two Golden Globe nominations, and it has finally got him treated as a dramatic actor. He also produces, co-hosts a long-running podcast about U2 with Scott Aukerman, and keeps returning to horror, where Krampus and The Monkey are the enjoyable ones.