Recently, at a Wizards basketball game in Washington, DC, actor Reid Scott was approached by a young woman shouting, “I’m the Dan! I’m the Dan in my office!”
“That’s not a good thing!” says Scott, who plays unscrupulous aide Dan Egan on the cutting political satire “Veep.”
Scott is now sipping an oolong tea at Lamill, a posh cafe in the Silver Lake neighborhood of LA, not far from his home. The 36-year-old, wearing a Rag & Bone button-down and Levi’s, was unwinding after an intense shooting schedule for the third season of “Veep”; the first episode airs on HBO on April 6.
He’s so convincing as the take-no-prisoners, career-climbing weasel Dan Egan, one might suspect he’s just playing a thinly veiled version of himself. As it turns out, Reid Scott isn’t morally bankrupt and aggressively ambitious.
“He’s the polar opposite,” the show’s vice-presidential Emmy-winning star Julia Louis-Dreyfus tells Alexa. “[Reid is] certainly a very confident guy, but he’s sensitive, a team player and generous. Those are not words you would ever use to describe Dan Egan.”
Scott’s just highly adept at playing a Machiavellian jerk. While the “Veep” cast are careful not to leak any spoilers, it’s clear that Dan Egan is going to undergo a bit of a metamorphosis. But don’t worry, he will emerge from his chrysalis as a “Silence of the Lambs” moth and not a beautiful butterfly.
“We get to see a kind of vulnerability,” Louis-Dreyfus says, “and there are a few massive surprises that come out of Dan’s mouth as the season unfolds. He’s given more responsibility and, needless to say, he can’t handle it. We have a bunch of scenes together which are . . . somewhat alarming. ‘Cringey’ comes to mind.”
Louis-Dreyfus thinks that her character Selina Meyer plays off of the weasel Dan Egan so well because of their similarities. “Selina and Dan are both narcissists in a very vivid kind of way,” she says. “It’s fascinating to see together. It’s like those figure skating couples that seem to be very fluid, and they’re moving at lightning speed across the ice, but one false move and they crash into each other and they’re both going to have cracked heads.”
Scott got his introduction to politics while growing up in Albany. His father is an attorney who’s been involved with Saratoga County politics for many years. His uncle successfully ran for office several times upstate, and since he was a child he was convinced that his uncle and his aunt hated each other because of their loud verbal debates.
“It wasn’t until I was older that I realized they were agreeing with each other, but really fervently, against the rest of the family,” Scott says. “You can’t get them together more than five minutes before a whole political discussion just starts tumbling out.”
Scott maintains that an acting career was never his goal. “This was all an accident,” he says. He studied film at Syracuse and took acting classes solely to hone his directing skills, and to, as he said, “See what it is those weirdos did all day.” A professor suggested he audition for a play, and later helped him get an agent. He spent some years in New York City, landing gigs on shows like “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” “My Boys” and “The Big C,” and studied improvisation at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which was co-founded by future “Veep” cast mate Matt Walsh, who plays a press secretary.
“I walked into the ‘Veep’ audition and Matt was there,” Scott says. “I had met him before, but he didn’t remember me.”
Though the cast works from a dense script, a lot of “Veep” is improvised, allowing Scott to put his training to good use. “Can I take credit for him being funny?” asks Walsh. “No, but he’s very smart and a comedy nerd. Reid’s really good at playing that character, and he can create material once we’re in the scene that is very believable, and from that point of view.”
To get into Egan’s duplicitous mindset, Scott read up on DC politics, studied pundits and met with genuine Beltway insiders. “Actually, the first bit of research I did was right here,” he recalls, turning to point at a nearby table. “One of my good buddies worked on the Hill for years — he worked on Howard Dean’s campaign, for the Clintons, he’s been a consultant for Bloomberg. So, I called him up and said, ‘Can you read this script, tell me what you think and give me some pointers?’ We sat down over there and the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Okay, so um, so you’re playing me.’ ”
Via his politically connected friend, Scott met with other DC staffers.“These kids were 24,” Scott says. “Their senator or congressman is rubber-stamping it, but they’re drafting major legislation! They’re all sleeping with each other and drinking like fish!” Scott was surprised at how willing they were to reveal information. “Nothing illegal,” he says, “but they were thrilled that someone wanted to tell their story and base characters and idiosyncrasies on them.”
The show’s wardrobe is also based on the sartorial style of politicos: disheveled, overworked and underpaid. “The DC crowd is about 10-years behind the fashion curve,” Scott says. “But Dan is a cutting edge schmooze, so he’s only 5 years behind.”
Scott was happy to get spruced up for the Alexa shoot. “My personal style falls between casual cool and meticulous slob,” he says. “I’m most comfortable in jeans, but I love fashion. Lately I’ve been a fan of Rag & Bone, Civilianaire and Ted Baker.”
Now that Season 3 has wrapped, Scott’s trying to put his producing (and directing) skills to work, including adapting a novel with his fiancée, the actress Elspeth Keller. “I intend to act forever if I can,” he says. “But I’m slowly now being afforded some opportunity to go back and do what I meant to do all along.” The first projects he’ll be working on are not comedic at all, and he looks at them as “sort of a palate cleanser” after the cynically political world of “Veep.”
“I’ll always come back to comedy,” he admits. “Doing drama can feel satisfying, but day to day, it’s just not as fun as laughing. I am very lucky that I get to go to work and laugh all day for my day job, and then go home and torture my artistic self.”