Adam Scott is the lead actor in Hokum, Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to Oddity, and he says the film’s mood was shaped as much by the Irish coast as by the script. Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a successful but troubled horror novelist who travels to a remote hotel in west Cork to scatter his parents’ ashes — and who, Scott admits, does violent things on screen, including burning a friendly bellhop with a heated spoon.
Scott spoke about the shoot and the choices that shaped his performance, saying bluntly, "He’s an asshole," and describing how being on location fed his work. He said he was already a fan of Damian’s and had seen Oddity: "Oddity fascinated me. I wanted to know the mind behind it, because he makes these wild choices to keep the camera on inanimate objects and stay for an uncomfortable amount of time on things that are not alive. It really frightened me." That fear, and McCarthy’s willingness to linger on the small and the still, is central to why Scott took the part.
Behind the line readings and the set pieces, Scott made his own notes about place. He said he had never been to west Cork or Skibbereen before filming and called the area "one of the most beautiful places on Earth." He stayed at the Liss Ard Estate during production and said the crowds of real couples at the estate — "There were a lot of people either on their honeymoon or on their anniversary trip" — supplied an uneasy contrast to his lonely, grieving character: "I was just the American weirdo staying upstairs. I loved it. And it lent itself to the story."
The numbers here are modest but telling: one actor, one director with a cult follow-up, and a single remote setting that doubled as character. Scott said he arrived already admiring McCarthy: "I was already a fan of Damian’s." He described his working instincts in guarded self-criticism — "I always watch myself and worry I’m being too big" — and the questions that drew him to Ohm Bauman. "What makes a person like that? And how do you untangle that with someone who isn’t particularly interested in untangling it? I thought it was a really fun prospect."
Context: Hokum arrives as Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to the cult favourite Oddity, and the film leans into the director’s taste for prolonged, unsettling observation. Scott’s character is a horror novelist grieving his parents who travels to a hotel in Ireland linked to their honeymoon; on set, Scott says he inhabited that bruised interior while surrounded by the outward happiness of holidaying couples.
The friction is plain on the page and on Scott’s face. He praised west Cork even while playing a man capable of cruelty. He said he was often alone away from family during the shoot — "Being on location is sometimes a real mixed bag, because it’s lonely without my family. But this was great." — and yet he stayed at a bustling estate among lovers. The contrast between the county’s serene beauty and the violent act Scott singled out — the heated spoon against a bellhop — is the story’s sharpest dissonance: an actor luxuriating in landscape while portraying a character who destroys small kindnesses.
Scott’s answers make clear how he approached that dissonance. He used the place to probe motive, not to soften it: the beautiful setting didn’t mitigate Ohm’s cruelty; it made the character’s failures more visible. Scott said he would get lost on days off, "walking and listening to podcasts," a method for absorbing the isolation that sits under a crowd of honeymooners. The result, by his account, was a performance built out of contradiction — admiration for the setting, distance from family, and an appetite to understand a misanthropic man.
In short: Scott embraced the collision of beauty and brutality. He came as a fan of McCarthy, stayed at Liss Ard Estate among honeymooners, and leaned into questions about what drives a person to harm others. If the headline asks how Hokum finds menace in a place Scott calls "one of the most beautiful places on Earth," his answer — and the film’s — is that the landscape only sharpens the character’s darkness, and that contrast is precisely what he set out to play.
