Fans of Adam Scott noticed the actor goes through some slight shifts in appearance for his work on Severance.
Scott plays Mark Scout in the Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller, an employee of the mysterious fictional Lumon corporation. The actor plays two characters in the show as Mark has undergone severance to split his work (innie) and personal (outie) personas.
Why Adam Scott Looks Different While Playing Mark Scout
Some fans noticed that Adam Scott's face appears different when playing Mark Scout in Severance compared to his normal public look.
Much of this is a stylistic choice to emphasize Mark's character. In the series, Mark is a grief-stricken widower who undergoes severance to forget the pain of losing his wife.
As a result, the costume and makeup choices for his innie and outie are often made to emphasize the character's grief and depression.
The main differentiator that fans may have picked up on is Mark's hairstyle, markedly different from Scott's natural style.
In Severance, Mark's hair is long and lank, which adds to the unkemptness surrounding his character. Meanwhile, Scott's hair is naturally shorter, styled, and buoyant. Some fans pointed out that one of the major changes is that Mark's hair covers his ears, which isn't a style normally seen on Scott.
Severance director Ben Stiller jokingly noted to Good Morning America that this was a stylistic choice to keep Scott's hair from being distracting:
"I felt like we had to do something because Adam's hair is unfair. He has unfair hair. It's just too good and I think sometimes it distracts you from the incredible actor that he is because you're just staring at his incredible hair. So I felt like we needed to give him a hairstyle that would level the playing field."
Similarly, specific lighting and camera choices in Severance emphasize the differences between the innies and outies.
Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné revealed in an interview with Premium Beat that specific lenses and lighting were used in the innie and outie environments to help establish the world and convey the actors' performances:
"We would use the longer lenses more often on the outside and the wider ones on the inside. We had a 20mm and 24mm spherical to shoot 6K on the Venice in the underground. Those two lenses were only used on the inside to achieve super wides that ultimately wanted straighter lines than an anamorphic lens can provide."
Mark and his Lumon colleagues' faces look dramatically different in scenes when they transition between their innie and outie.
To achieve this, the cinematographer added that they used a Zolly effect to show "how the actor's face would morph optically:"
"The transitions in the elevator are where the two worlds (Innie and Outie) converge, so we came up with the idea of using the Zolly, which is when you track in or out to compensate for the frame height with a zoom in or out. It’s been used in classics like Jaws and Vertigo. Usually, this effect is meant to show a perspective shift in the background. For us, it was about showing how the actor’s face would morph optically during the transition, thus amplifying the actor’s performance."
All these factors help distinguish the character from the actor, further embellishing the personal struggles that Mark faces in Severance and how they're reflected in both his innie and outie.
Adam Scott's New Look In Severance Season Episode 7
The emphasis on making Mark appear so different from Scott in Seasons 1 and 2 of Severance paid off in the most recent episode ("Chikhai Bardo").
Season 2, Episode 7 includes a flashback of Mark in his younger years, showing how he met his wife and their time together before Gemma's apparent death.
In these sequences, Mark is a lot closer in appearance to Scott's natural look, with a cleaner haircut, warmer makeup, and a styled beard. This all helped to accentuate Scott's performance as younger Mark, who is much livelier in contrast to his future self.
The change in look emphasizes the difference between Mark before and after losing his wife, showing how much the event impacted his life and care for himself.
New episodes of Severance Season 2 are released weekly on Apple TV+ on Fridays at 12 a.m. PT/3 a.m. ET.
