The Meryl Streep of millennial stupidity, Seann William Scott has rarely encountered a point he couldn’t majestically miss, or a cup of bodily waste he couldn’t guzzle down with aplomb. “I’m trying to think if I’ve ever played an intelligent person,” the actor muses. Dude, Where’s My Car? No chance. Role Models? Road Trip? Nah, not there. All four of his American Pie movies? Debatable, he insists. “I never really thought of Stifler as being dumb,” he says, of the horny jock whose various gross-out set pieces have since been clipped, compressed and posted to YouTube with titles like “Stifler the orgasm donor” or “Stifler eats poop”. “I saw him more as somebody who just wanted to be loved.”
Scott more or less defined American comedy 25 years ago, playing the handsome yet rubber-faced goof in a host of movies that were ribald and scatalogical for their first two-thirds, then sweetly sentimental after that. “I would say, a good 95 per cent of the movies I’ve done, I’ve played a total moron,” he jokes. It was an era of trippy, MTV-brained genre hopping, and jokes designed to make you hurl. Tom Green was a leading man. So, too, was Scott for a while, in things like Ivan Reitman’s goofy Evolution, the cult Canadian ice hockey comedy Goon, or the Dukes of Hazzard movie. And then he seemed to drop off the map a little – but only because comedies did as well.
“Why don’t they make comedies any more?” Scott asks, with a laugh. “It just seems like it’s been so long now.” He’s approached all the time by people who grew up on his films, and who today cling on to them as comfort blankets stained with something rotten. So the audience is there, he says. “But I’m trying to remember when the last big, successful R-rated comedy came out. I definitely haven’t made one since American Reunion.” (And that let’s-get-the-gang-back-together sequel was, depressingly, 14 years ago now.) “There’s great comedy on television, but maybe R-rated comedies in theatres are kind of done?”
I connect with Scott over Zoom, though he’s opted to keep his camera off. “I look like a mad scientist,” he says. “I looked in the mirror and it’s like I’ve stuck my finger in a light socket. I was worried you’d be worried.” He is apologetic for arriving late for our interview – he’s had to wake up his five-year-old daughter, make her breakfast, pack her lunch, get her to school. “It’s been a hell of a morning.”
The first thing you notice about the now 49-year-old Scott, then, is that he’s so, well… dad. I wanted to chat with him about his work, and Stifler, and what it was like to have a front-row seat as Hollywood’s biggest studios went from seeing comedy as a fundamental part of their output to treating it as a niche novelty. But Scott says he’s no expert – he just rode a wave for a while. It was luck and happenstance rather than a calling. “I’m happy that I was able to get things going early on in my career, and to now be at the point where I don’t feel like I have anything to prove,” he says. “I just want to make a fun little project every once in a while, then go home to my daughter.”
Right now, that project is Dolly, a lean, mean slasher movie in which Scott’s character is menaced by a hulking killer in a baby doll mask. “It’s like a love letter to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or French extremity,” he says. “It’s not some s***ty B-horror movie, you know?” Scott and Fabianne Therese play a couple hiking in the woods who are set upon, tormented, and lightly dissected – all on glorious 16mm film, inspired by the grindhouse classics director Rod Blackhurst grew up on. It’s the latest in a run of darker work Scott has acted in lately. He played a stone-faced serial killer in an indie movie called Bloodline, a cop tackling meth heads in a thriller titled Bad Man, and on Danny McBride’s cult comedy series The Righteous Gemstones, he ended up going on a shooting spree. “It’s been a lot of fun to do different things,” he says.
When he first moved to Los Angeles in the late Nineties, from his native Minnesota, Scott had no interest in pursuing comedy. “I always wanted darker roles, and more disturbing roles,” he remembers. “A Clockwork Orange was my favourite movie, you know? I wanted to be Malcolm McDowell.” Instead, he found himself in lots of movies with extended laxative scenes in them. He didn’t think he was particularly funny, either, so American Pie took him by surprise. He worked for just under a week on the first film, and was reportedly paid a meagre $8,000. “It might have actually been $6,000 or $7,000,” he says. “But that was also a s***-ton of money to me back then. I honestly didn’t care if it was considered low.”
I recall reading that many of American Pie’s stars – among them Jason Biggs, Tara Reid and Shannon Elizabeth – resisted signing on to a sequel until they received massive salary bumps, having earned relative pennies on the first film. Surely, with Stifler such a fan favourite, Scott was able to secure a big payday? “I never cared about money in that way,” he says. “I really mean this, but I would have done all of the American Pies for free.” He recalls that he was offered the action comedy The Rundown, alongside Dwayne Johnson, as part of his deal to come back for American Pie 2, and that was basically good enough. “I was like, wait, I get to do another American Pie and get to work with The Rock? And I feel the same way now as I did then… Like, I can’t believe I actually get to do this for a living.”
He admits that he spent much of the Noughties in a blur – he shot 21 films over the course of his first decade in acting, losing his head in Final Destination, learning kung fu from Chow Yun Fat in Bulletproof Monk, and voicing a possum in the Ice Age movies. All while being thought of, thanks to Stifler, as a bit of a dum-dum. “I could tell some people would get a little heartbroken when they met me, because they were expecting this, like, wild party animal, and I’m a pretty boring guy.” He laughs. “It felt like I was letting them find out Santa Claus isn’t real.”
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 day
New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled.
Try for free
ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.
Over the last decade, Scott has largely migrated to television, but he says that today he’s often found in doting dad mode. His daughter isn’t old enough yet to know why he’s stopped a lot in the street, or to actually watch any of his work, but recently he did show her an unusually PG-rated scene from American Pie 3 in which Stifler competes in a dance-off. “She laughed so hard, and it was one of my favourite moments in life, just watching her cackling at something I’ve done.”
He tells me he likes to work, but not to such an extent that it takes him away from home. “I feel like I’ve done so much more than I could ever have hoped for in my career, so there’s not much left that I care about creatively,” he says. “There’s a long list of filmmakers it’d be incredible to work with, sure, but I’m also not desperate for that. I’m happy just to be a dad.” He currently stars in a US sitcom called Shifting Gears alongside Tim Allen and Kat Dennings, and he describes it as the closest thing an actor can have to a nine-to-five. “I can go and be with these wonderful people and try to make people laugh, but I also get to take my daughter to school, and then finish work in time to go pick her up at the end of her day.”
He laughs, Stifler gone suburban.
“It’s sort of perfect.”
‘Dolly’ is in cinemas
