Adam Scott In The Whisper Man: 11 More Roles He Once Played

Adam Scott has been one of the most beloved actors in film and TV thanks to his performance as Ben Wyatt in Parks And Recreation and, more recently, his work as Mark in the award-winning Apple TV+ series Severance.

Over the years, he’s proved his versatility thanks to projects as varied as comedies Knocked Up, Step Brothers and Friends With Kids and horrors The Monkey and Hokum.

He can currently be seen in action in the new Netflix crime drama The Whisper Man, sharing the screen with Robert De Niro, The White Lotus’ Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton.

Before his big breakthrough, though, Adam spent decades in the industry playing small roles across a range of different shows and films, many of which might have completely passed you by.

Here are just 11 of those roles you might have forgotten that Adam Scott once played…

Adam’s early TV career included a multi-episode appearance in the iconic American family sitcom Boy Meets World, playing the charismatic school bully Griff Hawkins in three episodes of the show’s second season.

During an appearance on cast member Rider Strong’s recap podcast Pod Meets World back in 2023, Adam recalled an awkward experience on set which stuck with him for years.

On the last day of filming, he went to hug his co-star Rider, but only to be pushed off him. When he recalled this story to Rider, he was surprised to hear it, and immediately apologised, claiming he didn’t even remember the interaction.

While the pair squashed the three-decade beef, Adam admitted the on-set experience had long-term effects for him.

“It took me 20 years to overcome,” he said during a 2025 appearance on Entertainment Weekly’s Awardist podcast “It’s just being so freaked out being on a movie set or a TV set, because I was so excited about it, that I couldn’t kind of calm down and just relax and not worry about all that other, all the accoutrements around you.”

Another of Adam’s first film roles came when he appeared as Jacques in the fourth instalment of the Hellraiser franchise.

The film spanned four centuries and different three timelines of a cursed family trying to destroy an evil puzzle box in a bid to stop the hex that had been placed on them.

In the horror movie, Adam played the apprentice to the occult-obsessed French aristocrat Duc de L’Isle, in the 18th-century flashback scenes.

Chatting on Late Night with Seth Meyers in May this year, he admitted he was not exactly a fan of the film series, but just wanted to land a role.

“I didn’t know about Hellraiser,” he confessed. “But I was like, ‘Oh, this is an acting job?’ And so I was so excited.”

In the same year, Adam joined another famous franchise when he played a Conn Officer of the USS Defiant in the eighth Star Trek movie.

Adam made a small appearance as an officer who reported damage to the ship after the Borg attacked them.

“[My character] was only on the screen for 15, 20 seconds. He was a crew helmsman, but as it says in his character’s name, he was defiant. And I think you have to respect that,” Adam joked in a 2015 interview with Moviefone’s Unscripted.

This appearance in the sci-fi, which starred Patrick Stewart, is an especially fun easter egg for Parks And Rec fans, as Adam’s character, Ben, is a huge Star Trek fan.

The Alan Ball drama followed the personal and professional life of a dysfunctional family, who ran a funeral home in Los Angeles.

Adam made a two-episode appearance in the second season as Ben Cooper, an office worker with whom Michael C Hall’s character, David Fisher, briefly went out.

In fact, Adam had previously been in the running to play David in the series.

During an interview on the podcast Good Hang in August 2025, he told host Amy Poehler that not landing a part in the awad-winning series was “painful”, and he almost gave up acting because of it.

“[That rejection] was the one where I was like, ‘I might stop doing this. I think that it’s time for me to read the tea leaves and walk away’,” he admitted.

He added: “Yeah, that was a blow. That was hard. But it’s also important that you have those experiences.”

Adam had a small part in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as the aviation pioneer and businessman Howard Hughes, alongside Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-winning performance as Katherine Hepburn and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner.

Adam’s brief appearance in the 11-time Oscar-nominated movie saw him playing one of Howard’s publicists, Johnny Meyer.

In April 2026, Adam told The Guardian that he had been “freaked out” making a film with such a star-studded cast.

“I’m in one scene with Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett and Jude Law on this giant Cocoanut Grove [nightclub] set,” he explained, but later admitted he calmed down when he realised that even A-listers were “just regular people who happen to be actors figuring out a scene”.

“Everyone was extremely kind and generous to me and made me feel comfortable straight away”, he recalled.

Another project you may have forgotten Adam was involved with is the Jennifer Lopez rom-com Monster-In-Law.

The film starred Jane Fonda as a domineering mother determined to stop the wedding between her son Kevin, played by Michael Vartan, and J-Lo’s Charlie.

In Monster-In-Law, Adam played Remy, the gay next-door neighbour and confidant to Jen’s character, who she turns to after her “monster-in-law” starts to interfere with her relationship.

One of Adam’s earliest leading roles was in the short-lived drama Tell Me You Love Me.

The series revolved around three couples who all seek the help of therapist Dr. May Foster, played by Jane Alexander.

He appeared as Patek, who alongside Sonya Walger’s Carolyn, were a thirty-something professional couple trying for a baby, who visited the therapist after the pressure of conceiving a child starts to take its toll.

Tell Me You Love Me caused a stir at the time thanks to its frank depictions of sex, and while it was commissioned for a second series, the showrunner and the US network HBO were “unable to find the direction of the show”, so these plans were cancelled.

Just before Adam hit the big time as Ben in Parks And Recreation, he appeared in the ludicrous horror-comedy Piranha 3D.

A remake of the 1978 film Piranha, the film starred Kelly Brook, Elisabeth Shue and Christopher Lloyd, and parodied both the Piranha and Jaws franchises.

Adam played Novak, a seismologist diver who discovered a subterranean lake which unleashed prehistoric piranhas into the world.

Despite its wild premise, the film was a surprise hit, with critics praising how it “dishe[d] out gore, guffaws and gratuitous nudity with equal glee”.

By this point in his career, Adam had been better known for his work in Judd Apatow comedies and sitcoms, but broke type when he was cast as FBI agent Robert Fitzpatrick in the crime drama Black Mass.

The movie starred Johnny Depp as the real-life American mobster Whitey Bulger, alongside an ensemble cast that included Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson and Jesse Plemons.

Sporting a fantastic moustache, Adam played an agent who started to rightly believe

Joel Edgerton’s character, the agent John Connelly, was working with the mob on the sly.

Black Mass was a hit among critics, with Variety calling the film an “elegantly understated crime drama”.

In a return to the horror genre, Adam appeared as a co-lead in the unconventional Christmas movie Krampus.

The film starred Adam and Toni Collette as the of a boy who accidentally unleashes the wrath of a demonic spirit that punishes bad behaviour during the festive period.

Adam compared the 2015 movie to Amblin favourites of the ’80s, like Poltergeists, Gremlins and E.T., enthusing: “I hadn’t seen a movie like that being made for years, so I was excited, because those were the movies I grew up on and that I really love.”

Despite middling reviews at the time, the film has since become a sleeper hit thanks to streaming.

After Parks And Recreation ended in 2015, Adam enjoyed more mainstream success in Big Little Lies, where he played Reese Witherspoon’s on-screen husband.

He then starred in the now-forgotten supernatural sitcom Ghosted.

In the show, Adam and Craig Robinson played two men with very different beliefs about the afterlife, who are hired to investigate paranormal activity in Los Angeles.

Adam’s character, Max, was a former Stanford professor who believed in the concept of a multiverse, as well as theorising that his wife had been abducted by aliens.

Britt Lower played Max’s wife, years before the two actors would go on to work together again when she was cast opposite him as Helly R in Severance.

After the first six episodes, the series switched from a paranormal series to more of a workplace sitcom, after The Office’s Paul Lieberstein took over as showrunner.

Sadly, it was then cancelled after one season due to low ratings.

We all remember the Dakota Johnson-led superhero clanger that was Madame Web… but you may well have forgotten Adam Scott had a supporting role in it.

The film followed Dakota’s Cassie Web, who was haunted by the tragic death of her mother and, after an accident that nearly claimed her life, discovered that she had psychic abilities.

Adam played a paramedic called Ben Parker, an alternative version of Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben from the original comics (although Peter Parker notably doesn’t technically appear in Madame Web because it was made by Sony, and was therefore not part of the official MCU).

In their scathing reviews, some critics have called Madame Web one of the worst movies ever made, with Slate declaring it a “travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema”.

Still, despite its poor reviews, at least the superhero film did at least spawn some of the funniest memes of recent history.

The Whisper Man is streaming on Netflix now.