In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Scoot McNairy reflects on the road to what might be his biggest year in movies yet, from helping lead the horror hit Speak No Evil to taking on a small but pivotal role in the upcoming A Complete Unknown.
“This is a big, big year.” Scoot McNairy has just returned home from his first screening of A Complete Unknown (in theaters on Christmas), the Bob Dylan biopic led by Timothée Chalamet and the fourth and—presumably—final film starring McNairy to hit theaters in 2024. McNairy plays Dylan’s mentor Woody Guthrie, who’s battling Huntington’s disease in his final days. “The movie’s so good, Timmy’s so good, Ed Norton is so good,” McNairy says over Zoom from his sunny backyard, unable to contain a boyish grin. “I was just driving home, like, I’m so glad that I’m a part of the Bob Dylan story. Twenty-five years ago, I never would’ve thought that possible in a million years.”
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Playing Guthrie is the kind of gig that McNairy has come to perfect: a small role in a pedigreed project, trading dialogue with a big star and tasked with making an impact. He’s done it opposite Ben Affleck in Gone Girl, Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Nicole Kidman in Destroyer. But in A Complete Unknown, McNairy faced a unique challenge on top of the limited screen time: He couldn’t get to speak. “[Huntington’s] is very similar to dementia, and my mother has dementia, so I spent some time just watching her—and then I went through all of Woody Guthrie’s photographs at that time and looked at how he cocked his head,” McNairy says. “I had my hands tied behind my back. All the tools that I had in my bag of tricks over the last 25 years of acting were taken away.”
Those tools have been developed gradually, with broader audiences just starting to get a feel for McNairy’s idiosyncratic work. Now, at last, larger roles in buzzy movies, like 2024’s Speak No Evil and Nightbitch, have stopped feeling like exceptions to the rule.
Born in Dallas, Texas, McNairy left for college in Austin before going on to Los Angeles to pursue acting in his early 20s. He snagged small early parts in the likes of Wonderland and Herbie: Fully Loaded, but found success on the TV commercial circuit. “I had a commercial agent who’s still my manager today—I’ve been with him for 20 years—and he’d sent us on so many castings,” McNairy says. “I’m talking three to eight a week, tons of them.” McNairy learned what kind of actor he was through that process, experimenting with characters in stuffy casting offices and trying not to repeat himself from job to job. But even as he made a name for himself as a colorful auditioner, and even when a director wanted to hire him, he struggled to land film work: “I was in that position where they’re like, No—find somebody else that’s recognizable.”
McNairy came close to securing the part of a lovelorn technician in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before losing out on it to an actor fresh off of a massive, Oscar-winning franchise. “I really wanted that job and Elijah Wood got it,” McNairy says. He got closer to playing opposite Matthew McConaughey in the studio comedy Failure to Launch, perfecting a dopey-idiot archetype through to the audition room, where he showed up wearing one shoe and one sock.
“I told them, ‘Dude, man, I had a crazy morning: I ran out of the house, I thought my shoes were in the car and they weren’t!’” McNairy recalls, vividly acting out the memory. “I was in the running, and it would’ve been my first studio flick. Then Paramount said, ‘Who? No way. Get me somebody else.’” Justin Bartha ended up in the role. “I saw Justin in the movie and he was great,” McNairy says. “I thought Elijah Wood did an incredible job too. I still watch Eternal Sunshine all the time and have never, ever once thought, after seeing it, I wish I got that role.”
Still, at the time, his confidence dropped. In an audition for Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly, he went big as an amateur criminal on Brad Pitt’s hit list—“I made up this sort of Boston-y hodgepodge accent”—but then refused to believe he was under serious consideration. Even after receiving a callback, “I was like, ‘Bullshit, I’ve heard that before, I’m staying here.’” McNairy’s manager had to buy him a plane ticket to convince him to meet with Dominik again. He was offered the part there and then. “I was like ‘What? Do you want me to have this role?’” McNairy says. “‘Well, good luck getting past the studios.’ He was like, ‘We can.’”
McNairy wound up shooting that and Ben Affleck’s Argo back to back, and finally felt the tide turning. He stopped making commercials—a big decision given the more than 100 credits to his name by that point. “I’d done them for 10 years, but I wanted to be taken seriously as an actor,” he says. “I really wanted to not have commercials running at the time that these films came out. It probably was irrelevant, but to me it meant something.” Then a year passed, and the movies didn’t come out. He wasn’t sure what was happening with them. He’d get pitched for movies with the promise he had a big role opposite Pitt coming up—but without evidence, the credit hardly mattered.
“I had a really tough time,” McNairy says. He left Los Angeles and started up a construction business in his native Texas. “I didn’t want to be driving all around Los Angeles for another 10 years—going to Santa Monica, going to Hollywood, going to the Valley, going back and forth,” he says. “I just decided to move. The movies hadn’t come out, and I was like, ‘You know what? I think this is a sign for me to go do something else.’”
The movies came out eventually, of course—and that was his sign after that to come back.
Few actors can say they’ve starred in best-picture Oscar winners in consecutive years. Even fewer can claim that achievement without having attended either awards show. “I was working and I just couldn’t get out of it,” he says of missing the Oscars for both Argo and 12 Years a Slave, in which he played one of the men who kidnapped Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor). “I was just getting started—I’d spent 10 years wanting to do these movies, to work with these filmmakers.” When Argo won the top Oscar, McNairy was at a miner’s bar in Australia, where he was in production on The Rover with Robert Pattinson: “I was just like, ‘Yeah, nobody sitting around here gives a shit, and no one’s even watching this television.”
The long road to any kind of success in Hollywood ultimately served McNairy well. The glamour didn’t interest him as long as the work felt fresh. And what some might have considered disappointments felt, to him, like breakthroughs.
Take his first regular TV role in Halt and Catch Fire, the AMC drama that premiered a few months after 12 Years’ Oscar win. The period series imagined the birth of the World Wide Web and the computer revolution, and as the smugly nerdy engineer Gordon Clark, McNairy was mesmerizing—meek but determined, brilliant but myopic, heroic in spite of his ego. Critics loved the show, but it was under threat of cancellation for years, failing to click with viewers; it lasted four seasons. “I really wish it could have gone a little bit further into the future, with some of the things that we deal with now,” McNairy says. But he wasn’t particularly bothered by the ratings struggle.“I’d gone my whole life with nobody watching anything, you know what I mean? It wasn’t that new to me,” he says. “I’d been at the bottom forever.”
McNairy kept up the pace in other series like Godless, Narcos: Mexico, and True Detective, but some of his best work remains his most underseen, like the moving ‘70s San Francisco drama Fairyland, still unreleased after a Sundance 2023 premiere, or Blood for Dust, a noir thriller in which McNairy beautifully plays a sadsack salesman who turns to crime—and gets in way over his head. But 2024 finds him reaching a wider audience in rich roles. Already, the Blumhouse horror event Speak No Evil, in which McNairy and his Halt co-star Mackenzie Davis meet a sinister couple on vacation, is a box-office smash. And God is McNairy maddening (highly complimentary) in Nightbitch, hitting theaters on December 6.
Nightbitch’s writer-director, Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) has described her surreal film as a comedy for women and a horror movie for men, which places an intriguing burden on McNairy as the movie’s male lead: a well-meaning husband to a new mother (Amy Adams) who’s either turning into a dog, losing her mind, or both. Adapted from Rachel Yoder’s novel, Heller designs the movie as a gut-spilling expression of maternal rage and exhaustion, with McNairy in the role of smiley, unbothered spousal antagonist. He’s so warmly oblivious you’ll want to tear your hair out—or maybe run out barking into the night—on Adams’s behalf.
“Essentially, I’m playing [Marielle’s] husband, and a lot of these things were taken from her,” McNairy says. “Some of my lines were designed to tee up Amy, to say it in a way that would infuriate a mom. I could see those dynamics, but I couldn’t see the specificity of the details and the tone or the cadence.” He turned to his partner, actor Sosie Bacon, for help in understanding the subtext. “If you say it like this, it will really piss off a mom,” she’d say. McNairy would ask why and she’d explain, “Because….” McNairy’s education goes hand in hand with his character’s—it can be comically brutal to watch.
“And let’s be honest, Amy Adams is a slugger,” McNairy says. “She had just come off of a play, so she was sharp as a dagger. It was intimidating at first—I was playing catch-up a lot, and I don’t think I could have given a performance like that had I not been opposite somebody so talented.”
Next up for McNairy is Netflix’s series Man on Fire, starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a reimagining of the Denzel Washington film. Surely more credits for 2025 will pop up soon—this is a guy who will tell you multiple times over an hour-long interview how much he likes to work. What else might be on the horizon? “Man, I’ve been working with these filmmakers and taking notes for a decade. Now I’m ready to start directing,” he says. “And I’ve been wanting to work for Paul Thomas Anderson for 20 years, and I still haven’t done it. It’s gotta happen.” The bucket list must go even deeper than that—but it’s a good place to start.
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