“Someone wrote about me on Twitter once, and it was a friend who sent this message, ‘Whoever this guy is, he’s really cornering the market on incompetent villains,’” says Scott MacArthur. “That made me laugh.”
We’re an hour into April’s coffee with the actor and writer, and the conversation is just turning to his career. The anonymous assessment of his previous work holds some water. MacArthur was the kidnapped welder El Camino: A Bad Breaking Moviethe acrobatic blackmailer in Good gemstones And perhaps most memorably, he is the beloved friend of Kaitlin Olson’s character on the hit Fox comedy. The mic. But before we get into all that, or the hat-trick of jobs that made the world Running point A hard-to-avoid actor In recent months, MacArthur first had to talk about some dog problems. Moose, an 18-month-old ridgeback, was fighting with his larger peers at the local dog park. MacArthur seems a little concerned that he may have waited too long to neuter the family pet.
“Oh my god, did you get into all of this?” Kate Hudson asks as I recount the conversation. “Did he share that… I don’t know if this is my place to say…”
for him Running point The co-star alludes to an incident that occurred in 2025, in which MacArthur returned home to discover that Moss had sniffed out the box containing the ashes of the former family dog and devoured some of his ancestor’s — in MacArthur’s words: “He scattered the ashes like it was Scarface” — before scattering the rest all over the living room. “Scotty is full of stories, but I don’t know how many of them are true — maybe two-thirds of them,” Hudson says. “But he’s one of the smartest, most amazing, most talented, collaborative people I’ve ever worked with. I think he deserves the world.”
Maybe the world is catching up. After years of playing quite a few of those inept roles, MacArthur was booking a colorful tour. Season two Running pointa Netflix comedy about a family-run basketball team that is loosely inspired by the life of Jeanie Buss, sees him acting opposite his brother Hudson on screen. MacArthur recurs in the Steve Carell HBO comedy, RoosterLike a drunk hockey coach. Most recently, he landed a rare role of sorts as an old gangster opposite Brendan Gleeson and Nicolas Cage in the Amazon thriller. Spider Noir. Being a journeyman actor, as he explains over the better part of a morning at a Venice Beach café, was the kind of preparation he needed.
“There’s something that encourages you to be a wanderer,” says MacArthur, who lives on the West Side with his wife and two children. “There’s a resilience that’s built during that period. It’s the consistency you gain from working a lot, whether you’re seen or not. You just have to keep going.”
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MacArthur, a Chicago native, served his mandatory classes at Second City and Improv Olympic. But his path may have been best served by playing college sports in the Northeast where he was a backup goaltender in both field hockey and lacrosse. “You want your team to win, and that generally means the guy playing goalie is doing well,” MacArthur says. “But you’re in the weight room every morning and in training every afternoon. You’re dedicating a huge part of your life. Of course, You I want to play!
This angered him for a spell, but then he discovered that there were other ways he could be of value. He became comic relief in the locker room, in hotels and on bus rides home after a loss. His antics prepared him for a career in comedy, despite not being called up from the bench.
MacArthur was originally just a writer The mic. Nat Faxon played Jimmy in the 2016 pilot. But the project was a back-burner for Faxon, so when Fox ordered him to be included in the series, the part needed to be recast. It helped that MacArthur wrote the actual test material. History repeated itself two years ago. Kind of. Running point It was created by Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz, and David Stassen, three former MacArthur collaborators—the latter two being longtime friends from Chicago. The role of Nice Gordon, the Hudson-head general manager of the fictional Los Angeles Waves basketball team, was originally intended to be played by Barinholtz. But when his role in the movie was Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg studio The conflict became, called the MacArthur Trio.
“In almost everything I did, I wasn’t the first choice,” MacArthur says. “But I think I was my wife’s first choice.”
When Bill Lawrence was looking for someone funny who could skate on ice to fill the recurring role Roosterthe series’ co-creator found this to be a surprisingly difficult thing to do in Hollywood. Some of the scheduling stars aligned, as did the reality of it Running point and Rooster Co-writer and producer of Stassen, MacArthur manages to shed light on the high-profile comedy.
“I called Stassen and said, ‘Dude, you’ve got to let me keep using him,'” Lawrence says. “Watching him work with Steve Carell was a lot of fun. When two people are that fast, they break off from each other.”
Spider Noir Wanted has a different kind of muscle to MacArthur. He had to manage the fight choreography and some new, gray-toned accent work – “it all looked like we’d been chewing batteries for months.” His most stressful moments of the production were over almost immediately. “The first night on set I was doing a fight scene with Nicolas Cage,” he says. “I had to throw a punch without hitting him in the face.”
MacArthur now joins Cher in the ranks of famous performers to throw hands at Nic
olas Cage on screen – and Cage won’t be the last icon he flirts with.
MacArthur also had the advantage of spending his free time trying to soak up as much wisdom as possible from his more popular scene partner. It was Oscar-nominated Gleason who offered some comforting perspective on the dog-ash incident, suggesting, at least in MacArthur’s version of Gleason’s Irish accent, that it was simply the new dog’s way of taking over his place in the family.
In January, the feature-length comedy film began production on Netflix Fifth wheel. The film has already gotten a lot of attention for its premise (a trio played by Nikki Glaser, Brenda Song, and Fortune Feimster join their unlikely friend, Kim Kardashian, on a trip to Las Vegas) and its pedigree (Paula Pell and Janine Prieto wrote the script), but what early coverage has overlooked is the fact that MacArthur appears as a hibachi chef — and he’s in on the whole thing.
“We had some conversations about whether or not the character was good at hibachi,” he explains. “From an acting standpoint, even if you’re going to be bad at something, you want to try to be as good at it as possible and then reduce it.”
The YouTube tutorials were interesting but difficult to follow. So, he spent four days training with a hibachi chef at a Pasadena teppanyaki steakhouse. Not only did he want to be convincing, he also didn’t want to send the spoon in the wrong direction while posing with Kardashian and his friends. Running point Co-starring, Song.
“On the day of the shoot, Kim and Brenda were sitting across from me, and I’m thinking, ‘Now you’re flipping the spoon and fork of death four feet away from, arguably, the most famous face on the face of the Earth.’ Don’t screw this up,” MacArthur says. “I’ve never been wired. I had a few drops which bothered me, but on the way home, I had a flash of Gleason’s perspective where I thought, “Man, you didn’t cut it. This is a win.”
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A month after the coffee, I called MacArthur, partly to see if there was an update on Moose. “It was cut, but it didn’t do anything,” he says. “It’s crazy, but I guess that’s a good thing, right? It gives us all hope.”
There was better news on other fronts . Running point It has been renewed for a third season. There’s another party he thinks he’ll finish. Him and him The mic Collaborators Dave and John Chernin are working on the script. Although he reduces his efforts Fifth wheeljoking that it would likely be edited down to just 30 seconds, his commitment to Hibashi reflects something many around him point out.
“Yes, he’s funny, but he puts his heart into everything,” Hudson says. “Scotty is very serious about art.”
He’s not just here for the “incompetent villains.” And the industry may have finally figured it out.
“I hope there are a lot of aspects that the general public doesn’t see,” MacArthur says. “I am educated! I have traveled a lot! My poor mother is still waiting for me to become a doctor Gray’s Anatomy“.
