2024 may have launched "Brat Summer," but for the last few months we've been living in "Scoot Fall." Due to a serendipitous convergence of scheduling chaos, Scoot McNairy, 47, has popped up in not one, not two, but three of autumn's buzziest releases: Speak No Evil, Nightbitch and A Complete Unknown.
If you're thinking to yourself, "I didn't realize Scoot McNairy was in all three of these films," or perhaps even "I don't know who Scoot McNairy is," I would hazard that you actually probably do. The everyman actor is the definition of a "oh yes, that guy" figure, who you've certainly seen at least a half-dozen times onscreen without knowing his name. His impressive filmography includes titles as disparate as 12 Years a Slave and Herbie: Fully Loaded. He's popped up in Argo, Gone Girl, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Lyly, Lyle, Crocodile. On the TV side of things, he's had recurring roles on Halt and Catch Fire, Fargo and True Detective.
When I asked which project he gets identified for most on the street, his answer was Narcos: Mexico. "I live on the east side of Los Angeles, which has a lot of Mexican and Latino people and a lot of that culture," he explained. But following "Scoot Fall," perhaps McNairy will be stopped more often in L.A.
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Scoot McNairy in Speak No EvilBlunhouse Pictures
"It's ironic that they're all releasing around the same time," McNairy told Parade over the phone while in his car. "I'm just so grateful they all have come out. Obviously Nightbitch [which filmed in 2022] was supposed to release much sooner, but because of the SAG strike, everything got pushed. Speak No Evil, we were actually shooting during the strike [in 2023] and had to shut down with only a week left. I'm super stoked for these movies to finally come out."
The delays of both Speak No Evil and Nightbitch timed them perfectly with A Complete Unknown, which filmed earlier in 2024 and was rushed out to qualify for the 2024/2025 awards season.
"Scoot Fall" hit the ground running back in September when the Blumhouse remake of the 2002 Danish film Speak No Evil arrived in theaters to a solid reviews and a strong box-office haul. In the thriller, McNairy plays half of a couple who decide to vacation at the home of a family they barely know. As tends to happen in horror films, the benevolent hosts turn out to be serial killers.
McNairy's second film, Nightbitch, which be-bopped around the festival circuit before a wide release in early December, sees McNairy starring opposite Amy Adams as a beleaguered housewife who may or may not be transforming into a dog. McNairy plays her husband, who travels often for work and leaves his canine wife home alone with their small child.
And now McNairy is back on the big screen in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, playing folk musician Woody Guthrie opposite Timotheé Chalamet's Dylan. It's perhaps his most impressive performance of the trio.
Related: Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning on Bob Dylan's Approval, 'A Complete Unknown' and Prosthetic Noses (Exclusive)
Scoot McNairy in NightbitchSearchlight Pictures
In the Dylan biopic, McNairy's Woody Guthrie is largely immobile, living in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey due to a prolonged battle with Huntington's disease. While the neurodegenerative disease that impacts both physical and cognitive functioning has left Guthrie unable to perform, both Dylan and Seeger visit him throughout the film.
Prior to signing onto the project, McNairy wasn't a folk-music expert. "I knew a little bit about Woody Guthrie from growing up in Texas," he told Parade, "and a lot of my friends are musicians that idolized him."
Rather than intensely researching Guthrie's oeuvre, however, McNairy focused his energies on the physicality of Huntington's. "I found these photographs of him at Greystone, and my focal point was just to study these pictures of his mannerisms," he said.
He also used his mother's battle with dementia as inspiration for the role. "Anybody that has a family member that has gone through that knows it's really difficult and trying," McNairy explained. "My mom was in this weird way very helpful to me when playing this person who lacks their motor skills and has a sort of blankness to them, where they're there but not really there. I leaned into that more than researching Woody."
While none of McNairy's trio of roles were easy (he had to wrestle with James McAvoy in Speak No Evil, after all), A Complete Unknown stood apart as especially difficult. "The role ended up being a lot more difficult than I had thought," McNairy confessed. "All the instruments you have as an actor are taken away from you. You don't realize how much you utilize [your body] to speak without speaking. When you can't speak at all and then you take away all of your other tools, you find yourself in this place of insecurity and discomfort."
McNairy developed the character's physicality on set with the movie's director James Mangold, who hammered home just how still McNairy needed to be.
"He was like, 'Stop. Don't move your head.'" McNairy remembered, "'Don't even move your eyes, but I still need you to speak with your eyes, but you can't use them and I still need you to speak with your head, but you can't use your head.'"
Related: Meet the Real Life Women Who Inspired 'A Complete Unknown': Inside Bob Dylan's Relationships
Scoot McNairy in A Complete UnknownSearchlight Pictures
Despite Guthrie's bedridden nature, McNairy certainly took in his co-stars during their shooting days early in the film's production, especially Chalamet's Bob Dylan performance and the live on-set singing.
"I think that was the first live on-set song he sang, in the shoot," McNairy told Parade, referring to the scene in which Chalamet's Dylan performs "Song to Woody" for his friend. "And so I was feeling the same way the entire crew did about how much he had embodied this iconic person that we know. I was jaw-dropped without being able to drop my jaw. To be one of the first to see it with a front row seat, I was just floored, man. I was absolutely floored."
McNairy, however, is extremely grateful he didn't need to sing on set. "If I'd have gotten a musical role, I'd have been fired on the first day," he said, although he was originally slated to perform.
"There was a moment when James was going to have me sing a song, and they were going to use some 1940s black-and-white footage of what he's singing," he explained. "Up until they finished the film, there was still talk about it. When it went away, I was a bit relieved."
It's a smidge ironic that McNairy classifies himself as not having a "musical brain" based on who he's dating. The actor has been in a relationship with Sosie Bacon since 2021, after the pair met on the set of Narcos: Mexico. Bacon, an actress herself, is the daughter of Hollywood royalty, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, and much of her Instagram feed is dedicated to the Bacon family singing around their farm. Just on Thanksgiving Sosie and her parents performed a goat-themed cover to Chappell Roan's "HOT TO GO!"
McNairy and Bacon's relationship seems to be less based on the arts, however, and more based on a shared love of adventure.
When asked about the pair working together McNairy said, "We do collaborate and throw things back and forth to each other, but as far as the choices she makes, those are a hundred percent her choices."
Instead of talking shop, the pair are remodeling their fixer-upper. "Everything under the sun needs to be fixed, down to the plumbing," McNairy said.
When I asked how he picked up his home renovation skills, he said it was all self-taught. "My father couldn't turn a screwdriver," he said, "By default, I was forced to learn how to do all kinds of things, install dishwashers and stuff. I've learned over the years how to fix things by failing."
Related: Elle Fanning Reveals Her Dream of Playing an Iconic Princess on the Big Screen (Exclusive)
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Bacon and McNairy's other hobby is roadtripping. "Me and Sosie like to hit the road any time we get off," he said. "We get in the car with no destination and just start driving and figure it out when we're on the road."
"I love the spontaneity that she has," he gushed. "And the willingness to go with my spontaneity. That's our tradition." The farthest they've made it so far is Arkansas, before they've had to turn around and head back.
So far McNairy and Bacon's spontaneous trips have gone decidedly better than the one in Speak No Evil, and it seems that McNairy is a more thoughtful partner than those he played in this fall's films. He pushes back, however, when I lump the Nightbitch and Speak No Evil husbands as "crappy."
"I'm not going to judge my characters," he said. "I feel like in Speak No Evil, you have a marriage that's rough and it's hard and you go through hard times in relationships. I was really just focused on being true to that. And in Nightbitch, I don't think he's an awful husband. I think that he's genuinely confused and wants to do the right thing, but just doesn't know how. I find those things very true and real in relationships."
Whether he's watching his wife grow fur, wrestling with murderers or providing his blessing to Bob Dylan, Scoot McNairy is giving it his all. "In all three of these parts," he said, "I was just doing my best to try and keep it ...
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