Tom Everett Scott graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Syracuse University. His career started in New York, where he did commercials (McDonald’s, Coke, Diet Coke, Crest), an after-school special (Love in the Dark Ages, in which his character gives his girlfriend Chlamydia), and a recurring role as Grace’s son on Grace Under Fire.
Tom’s feature films include That Thing You Do!, An American Werewolf in Paris, Dead Man on Campus, One True Thing, The Love Letter, and Boiler Room. Television shows include The $treet, Philly, ER, and ABC’s love life. His TV movies include Karrol’s Christmas and Surrender Dorothy.
Tom’s theatre credits include The Country Club by Douglas Carter Beane at the Drama Department, Touch by Toni Press-Coffman at the Women’s Project Theatre, and Turnaround by Roger Kumble at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood. More information is available at https://imdb.com/name/nm0779866.
I think freshman year of college was when I realized I was going to major in acting. I knew I was going to college because that was my parents’ plan, and I was cool with that. I wanted to do it too. I have three sisters—two older and one younger. My two older sisters were already on their way to college so it was my turn to pick a college and at the same time kind of figure out what I wanted to do.
But even before that, I remember seeing my sister in South Pacific. She’s four years older than me and I remember thinking, seeing her in this play, that she blew her moment. She was fine, but I was like, “I would’ve done that differently.” They did three performances and I went to all of them. I memorized the moments on stage and couldn’t wait to get up on the stage and show what I could do. At that point I started doing whatever plays were available to me in the fifth grade.
The AV club in high school—the guys who pushed around the VCRs and TVs into the rooms—had a studio in some room at the high school. They had three cameras set up and you could switch from camera to camera and record stuff. We would go in there and just sort of mess around. There was a kid who was into 8mm film, making his own films and showing them. Then the cable company came along and put a public access cable station where we used to have our little crappy camera set up at the school. They brought in all new equipment and a guy! Ralph Wadman was the program director of our local public access channel. He would come to our high school and sit in this little room with all this equipment. He was doing an evening show with guests—it was boring—but the rest of the time it was 24/7 character generator screens of, “East Bridgewater Current Events.” So, at eight o’clock there’d be a person actually talking on this channel. I started hanging around and Ralph said, “Why don’t you announce basketball games?” I said, “Sure!” So, I went down, took a camera, filmed the game, and I’d interview everybody.
Eventually, I said, “Y’know, what I really want to do is get my friends down here and we’ll do, like, a show.” We started putting together little sketches and stuff. Ralph was like, “You can do this as long as you come in with a script first.” So, he gave me an assignment and I’d come in with a script for him and we started doing shows. This is when it really dawned on me that there was a future in this. I saw Ralph was getting paid to sit there and do something fun, so I asked him what he majored in. He said, “Communications.” That was the first I had ever heard of that word used to describe something you could major in and do for a living. And it was like a five-dollar word, so I knew I could go repeat that to my parents and have them go, “Ooh! Wow! Yeah, that sounds good!”
So, I went to the college expo in Boston and we went on a school bus—me and all the juniors that wanted to go to college—and I just went from table to table going, “What kind of Communications Department do you have?” Syracuse had this great Communications School. I didn’t want to be a news guy. Bob Costas and Ted Koppel didn’t excite me. It was just that this school had this top program, so I thought, “I’d better go to this top school.” So, I applied and got into Syracuse. When I interviewed with this woman at Syracuse—before I got accepted—she looked at my resume of stuff that I liked doing and my essay that I wrote about performing and being in band and all the kinds of things that got me going. She said, “You seem more like an actor, not a journalist.” I said, “Uh, no. I’m going to stick with Communications.” I thought it was more realistic. I didn’t really know that I wanted to be an actor. I was pretty sure that I didn’t. In my mind, you were only an actor if you had nepotism going for you. It didn’t seem possible that anybody from my hometown would be an actor.
Meanwhile, I’m doing summer theatre. I’m going down to this renaissance faire every summer in Rhode Island and doing these wild things, smoking pot for the first time, and doing wild performance stuff. So, I go to Syracuse and I’m majoring in Communications. Everyone was nice and I was learning a little something, but obviously the class that I loved the most was my public speaking class. I got to get up in front of everybody and perform. I knew I liked it. This really cute girl lived on my floor in my dorm. She was in the Drama Department. She was going to be in a play called The Member of the Wedding and she said, “Wanna come down and see me in the play?” I didn’t even know where the theatre was. Syracuse is this beautiful campus—great school, really fun—and the theatre is way off campus. I had to take a bus and I got off the bus, walked into the lobby, and saw kids my age—obviously Theatre and Musical Theatre majors—literally flitting. Goofy people! I thought, “This might be my crowd. I think this is where I want to be.” I sat down in the theatre, the lights went down, lights came up on stage, and that’s when it all came crashing down. I thought, “This is her major. She’s not putting up with boring stuff with maybe one good class. This is her class! Ah!” That was it. It was a done deal. I went to my advisor and said, “How do I switch? Is it easy?” She said, “Yep! You can do it. Turn your Communications classes into electives. You have to audition for the department. That’s it.”
I wanted to make sure that I had answered all the questions that my parents would ask so that, when I told them about it, I had all the answers. My mom said, “Just do me a favor, before you do this. I want you to go to the renaissance faire guys and ask them if they think this is a good idea.” They were the only professional actors we knew. They were like, “Yeah! Of course! Sure!” Little did they know, they sealed my fate as an actor. They then helped me actually prepare my monologue for my audition and stuff. I did a monologue from The Glass Menagerie. I auditioned, went the whole summer without knowing if I made it, signed up for all of my sophomore year Communications classes, kept getting the runaround from Syracuse College of Performing Arts, and then when I got there I bought all of my books for my Communications classes. I was so depressed. I couldn’t believe I was on a waiting list or something like that. I just took matters in my own hands and went down to the office of the woman who was holding all of the information for the College of Visual and Performing Arts. I said, “My mom’s been calling you all summer to find out if I’m in the Drama Department. Am I on a list? Am I waiting?” She literally looked at a list and said, “Oh? Tom Scott? Oh, yeah! No, you’re in Theatre. You’ve missed your first three days of class.” I was so excited but I was also like, “Oh, no!” I realized I had money sitting on my desk in the form of useless books and returned all of them, ran down to the theatre, met with my new advisor—Donna Inglima, who was one of my most trusted adults in the Drama Department—and she said, “You didn’t miss a thing. Go on in! Meet everybody.” And I was happy as a clam.
What was your first paid gig?
A McDonald’s commercial, after college. While I was a sophomore, taking freshman core classes, there was this other kid, Jay Harrington, who is a working actor these days. He had done a McDonald’s commercial and he was the most popular kid in the Drama Department. I didn’t know how people became actors and here I was pursuing it. I was thinking, “How did Jay Harrington get that audition? How did this happen?” There was so much to focus on, just majoring in Theatre, that was more about getting the acting down. We weren’t really thinking about where we were going until senior year, when people started talking about where they’d go after college. Three cities always came up: LA, New York, and Chicago. My friends and I thought, “Chicago! That sounds cool. The Windy City! Let’s go.” But that never happened.
Syracuse does a scene night kind of like the Leagues. It’s where all the seniors that got picked to go—you had to audition—would go into New York for this showcase. I got paired up with Samantha Brown and we did the only comic scene out of anybody. We did Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy—the blind date scene—and they’re both crazy characters. This was my trip to New York. New York seemed like forget it! I went there once in high school with my band—a band field trip or whatever—and it seemed like this concrete place. I grew up in a small town in rural Massachusetts with three stoplights in the whole town. New York scared the hell out of all of us on this trip. We all sort of huddled close as we went around the City. So, when we went down there for this senior showcase, it was the same place—it gave me the same anxiety—but now kids that had graduated ahead of me that I knew were living there. They came to visit us when we did our scene night. They took us around after, and you know how New Yorkers walk around, crossing against the light, and I’m like, “Go? Really? Oh, now? Oh! Okay.” That’s when I realized that I could move to New York. If they could do it, I could do it.
This scene night, I got ten responses out of fifteen industry people there. We were awesome. I was so excited. I had casting directors and agents wanting to see me. They wanted me to call them. They had little boxes to check: “Send a headshot,” “Please call,” “No thanks,” and I got all these “Please call” checkboxes. So I go back to Syracuse and call them the next day and they all say, “When do you graduate?” “When do you move to the City?” “When you’re living in the City, give us another call. Come in. We’ll meetcha.” That was my foot-in-the-door, in terms of starting out. I had really crappy headshots that some guy at Syracuse had done for me, so they all told me to get new headshots. I was like, “No way! I just spent fifty-five dollars on headshots!” It was so funny.
I graduated. I went home to Massachusetts. I slept in my bed probably that first night back and I was in my bed going, “I’ve got to get out of here. What am I doing?” I packed my Dodge Shadow up, my sister drove me down there—I didn’t need the car, so I handed it off to my sister—and there I was, in New York, living with a friend of a friend. It’s so weird how we’ll just live with somebody we’ve never met because we have a friend in common, but that’s what you do when you’re young and moving to New York, I guess. My buddy Craig Walker got me a job at the Firehouse at 85th and Columbus, waiting tables. I started looking up all these agents and casting directors.
Mitchell Riggs—my roommate—said the smartest thing to me that anybody had ever said to me at that point. He said, “Ask the casting directors if those agents on your list are any good.” The first person I met with then was CBS’ Maria Gillen—I don’t know where she is now—and she looked at the list and said, “I only know one of these people.” I said, “What does that mean?” She said, “Well, they submit actors to me in these manila envelopes,” and she showed me like a pile of them, and then she said, “I’m only going to open the ones from agents that I trust to have good people. If you’re with one of these people that I don’t even know, I’m never going to see your headshot.” There were a couple agencies I went to. They kind of gave me the whole, “Well, we’ll freelance,” thing. Some of them wanted to sign me right away. I held off, based on Maria’s advice. She said, “Don’t sign with anybody. Just freelance.” And most agents were like, “Well, if you freelance, we’re not really going to keep you at the top of our priority list.” There was that moment of, “Am I doing the right thing?” Meanwhile, all these agents are telling me, “Why don’t you change your hair? Wear this. Wear that.” They really start dressing you down. They really start working on your confidence. Luckily, I just had this good feeling that I was getting good advice from both Mitchell and Maria. I just kind of hung in there and kept waiting tables and went on a couple of auditions from people I was freelancing with.
Jeff Bell—a competitive friend—and I, were jockeying for jobs. One day he said, “Did you meet with Tracy’s agent friend?” Tracy was a bartender at the Firehouse. She was this cool girl. She wasn’t an actress. She went to Law School and was just really cool. I didn’t think I’d been talking with Tracy enough to go up to her and ask about her agent friend. He was like, “Well, Tracy’s friend is an agent at J. Michael Bloom and I’m goin’ in.” So, Jeff went in, and they were like, “Sorry.” My buddy Craig Walker went in and met the guy and they were like, “Sorry.” Tracy came up to me and said, “My friend Rob is an agent at J. Michael Bloom and I think he’d like you.” I was like, “Hold on, Tracy. Did you save this guy’s life in Nam or something? How does he owe you something so much that you can keep sending him these guys that he keeps rejecting? He’s not going to be your friend for long if you keep sending these waiters and bartenders that he keeps sending away!” She said, “I think you’re a really great guy and he’d want to meet you.” She gave me his number and I didn’t call. Honestly, I thought it was a waste of time.
A week later we were working together, another shift, and she said, “I told my friend Rob all about you and you haven’t called him yet!” So, I called up and met with Rob Claus and Mark Upchurch of the youth legit department for the East Coast office of J. Michael Bloom. They said, “We’d like to send you out on after-school specials, youth stuff. You’re at the top of our age range, really, but you’re too baby-faced for our adult division. So they had me go away and prepare two monologues. It was nerve-wracking, but I did it. I did a Howard Korder monologue from Boy’s Life and my other monologue was one a friend from Syracuse wrote about a guy who was a high school football star who broke his leg. It was good! I did those two monologues and they told me they would think about everything and that I should give them a call the next day.
So they wanted to sign me, but I checked with Mitchell. He and Maria had been advising me through these three months. Mitchell said, “God bless, man. Sign. You’re way ahead of the curve. This is a real agency. Unbelievable, Tom. I’ve been here four years and I hate my crappy agent. Sign.” When I went to sign, I said, “What about commercials?” They said, “Oh, yeah! Meet so-and-so.” We walked down the hall; they gave me some commercial copy. I read it and they said, “Great! We’ll start sending you out.” I didn’t have any headshots that were worth anything, so they would take Polaroids of me each week—like ten or twelve Polaroids—and it was the most ridiculous thing to walk into an audition and have the casting director hold up a Polaroid and go, “What is this? This is ridiculous!” Literally, I was being made fun of each time I’d go in for an audition: “Seriously, man. Get a headshot.” So, I did. Eventually.
So, after six months in New York, I booked that McDonald’s commercial, quit my job at the Firehouse, and man did I quit too soon. I know people who’ve never quit their day job. I’ve always admired people who keep a day job just to keep their sanity. I wish I had because I lost my sanity in a way, living by the mailbox and harassing the payment person at Bloom: “Any residuals yet?”
What do you consider your first break?
The biggest break was That Thing You Do! I was with Bloom still and I was in a theatre company with Craig Walker—he and I started this theatre company—and I was down there in the basement on 26th Street (we were renting this four-thousand square-foot basement to put shows up). I was down there in that office—that was kind of my alternate phone there—and my agent, Mark Schlegel, called there and said, “I’ve got this script. Tom Hanks has written it. It’s a feature film for Fox and you’re perfect for the lead. We just don’t have a headshot.” Now, I had already done the headshot! Here’s the horrible truth. I got my headshots done, right when I got that McDonald’s commercial. Andrew Brucker had taken these great headshots and Bloom had just run out of them at the time this was happening. I had a headshot at the theatre, so I grabbed it and I ran down to Bloom, gave it to Mark, and he gave me the script to read. Howard Feuer was casting it. They said, “You’ll do a few scenes, but know the whole script.” For no other audition had they ever said that to me.
Tom’s not a hardcore, make-it-difficult kind of guy. He’s a let’s-make-it-easy kind of guy. Looking back, it was kind of odd that they were having me know this whole script for an audition. I went in on a Thursday right around my birthday—September 7th—and it was in ’95. I’d been living in the City about three years. I went into Jonathan Demme’s offices—he was producing and he had directed Tom in Philadelphia—and read for Howard Feuer and he said, “That was really great. I’m going to have you come back on Saturday and read for the director.” And I’m like, “And the director is Tom Hanks?” And he said, “Yes. That’d be Tom Hanks.” Again, he told me to be familiar with the whole script.
Basically, I knew that this was a role that I was perfect for. I had been auditioning for films since I’d signed with Bloom but not yet really booking anything. I was auditioning daily, like two, three auditions a day. That’s really the best way to have a shot at it, is being out there all the time. There’s no formula for getting an agent, but the agent is the one who can get you all of those auditions. Anyway, the role was perfect for me because it was about a guy who loved music and got an opportunity to be in a band and the band got a big break. I was like, “I’m an actor who is passionate about acting and if I got this film, this would be my big break.” Literally, I was thinking I could go in and be this guy. This guy is me. I worked my ass off on the script and I went in and was sitting there. Josh Hamilton, who I knew from the movie Alive, was there, auditioning. I thought, “Well, I’ll come close on this, but he’s a guy with credits.”
While I was waiting, I went into the bathroom and I heard Tom Hanks’ voice. I heard him yelling at somebody, kidding around, in that really recognizable voice. I got really nervous. I went in and he kicked everybody out of the casting room—Howard and two readers—and it was just the two of us. He took my headshot and resume and said, “Okay. Let’s see here. It says here you play trumpet and bass guitar.” I did not play bass guitar. I had bought a bass guitar in high school in the hopes of playing bass guitar someday and being in a band, but never really learned how to play bass guitar. Trumpet, I’d played from fourth grade, on. He said, “Because I’m an actor and I know that this could be a complete lie.” I said, “Yeah, yeah! It’s true!” He goes, “So you have some sense of rhythm?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Okay.” And that was it. That was the only, “Can you play the drums,” line of questioning there was. The rest of it was, “Oh, you’re in a theatre company?” and “If you become a film star, they’ll all hate you,” joking around. He asked, “What did you think of the script?” I said, “Well, I think this character is me.” I gave him my point-of-view. We read a couple of scenes—he had brought everybody back in, they taped it—and he said, “Great.” That was it. I left. I said a little prayer on the corner of the block before I crossed the street, like, “I really want this job.” I remember there was a music store on the corner with a vintage drum set sitting in the front window. I was like, “What a weird little omen to all that is happening!”
Monday at 10am, my agent called me and said, “Okay, you’ve got to go back in and read with Tom. He’s flying back to LA tonight and you’ve got to go back in and read with an actress. Know the whole script.” Same thing. I went in and I was sitting next to Liv Tyler in the waiting room. There were other boys there, but she was the only girl there. I knew who she was because the Aerosmith video was out. Basically, I went in, sat with her, and Tom gave her some notes—I can’t remember what he told her to do—and he told me, “Don’t do anything. Just read. Don’t worry about doing a thing.” We read the stuff and he said, “Okay, stand up next to each other.” We stood up next to each other and she’s tall. I’m tall. He was like, “Oh! Okay!” Like we weren’t an obvious mismatch or something. He said, “Put these sunglasses on,” and he took a Polaroid. I was just like, “Is this really happening?” What happened after that is, basically, I went into freak-out mode in my mind. I repressed all thought of this ever happening. I couldn’t think about it, although I knew it went well.
Then they had me meet Jonathan Demme. We bullshitted about acting and theatre in New York and that was it. I had been on Grace Under Fire—I played Brett Butler’s son and was recurring on that—and that was the only thing they had to look at, from the current season. So, Thursday, a week from my first audition with Howard, I got a call. My agent had said, at six, “We didn’t get any calls today. I’m going to the theatre and I’ll have my pager on me.” I got a call from a guy like around eight o’clock, nine o’clock. He was like, “Is this Tom Everett Scott?” That’s not typical. Everyone calls me “Tom Scott.” So, I knew it was related to acting. I said, “Yeah, yeah. This is Tom.” He said, “Okay. Just wanted to make sure this was your number.” I said, “Wait, wait—who’s this?” He said, “This is Ed Saxon from That Thing You Do! I’m a producer on the movie and I’m really just calling to make sure this is your number.” So, I got off the phone and I grabbed my laundry bag. My girlfriend Jenny—now my wife—and my roommate Andrew Sgroi were like, “What was that?” I said, “I gotta get outta here. I’m gonna go get my laundry. Then let’s go out and get a drink.” I go down and then come back up with my laundry and ask, “Anything?” “Nothing.” “Phone hasn’t rung?” “Nope.”
Phone rings. Scoop it up. Say, “Hello?” And this voice says, “Hi. Is this Tom?” I say, “Yep.” “Tom Hanks.” I was like, “All right.” And that was it. I’m sitting in the kitchen of my railroad apartment and talking to Tom Hanks. He’s saying all of these great things and, asks, “Do you wanna be in my movie?” That was my big break, that movie. Sure enough, it really did parallel what I was going through. What I was going through and what the character was going through was the exact same situation, really. There’s things that started happening that didn’t happen before: getting meetings with heads of studios; general meetings with all these people that just wanted to see my face, talk to me in person; and getting straight offers, not having to audition for some stuff. That’s nice.
What made you choose Los Angeles?
Eventually, it was this series called Philly. It was on ABC with Kim Delaney for Steven Bochco. That’s what brought us out here. We wound up coming out here in July 2001. September 11th happened that September and we got really serious about limiting the number of flights we took and also realized that LA was where we needed to be for work.
Do you ever feel like giving up?
I always say this—it’s kind of my joke-y answer to that, but it’s also really true—I don’t think I can do anything else. Honestly, I don’t think I’m good at anything else. The real answer might be that I’m so competitive that I have tried other things but realized that I wasn’t as good at them as I am at this. I found the thing that I love and I’m also good at and can compete well at. That’s really why I do it.
Who are your favorite actors?
I think Robert Duvall always jumps into my mind as somebody I’ve always believed everything he’s ever done. Tom Hanks is obviously one of my idols—was always, even before. Bosom Buddies was such a great show. I honestly believe that the latest, greatest performance I’ve seen is what tends to qualify as my favorite, as favorite actors go. I just watched Ray and Collateral in the last month and Jamie Foxx now blows me away. I just watched City of God and I think everyone in that cast was brilliant.
What advice would you give to an actor starting out?
I’ve had a really lucky go of it. I have friends that still want to be actors at my age and they hit the pavement. I think that the biggest disservice you can do yourself, if you want to be an actor, is to wait for that break and not do anything until then. I think at any point, you should be doing plays, staying sharp. The only way to stay sharp is to do a play. I have never taken a class since college and I’m sure class is great—I know there are people who believe in it and love it and get a lot out of it, I probably would too—but I’d much rather spend my time rehearsing for a play that’s actually going to go up in front of an audience and we’re going to do the whole thing, get that adrenalin rush, and play that character more than once. That, to me, is the best way to stay sharp. I mean, look at what I was doing when I got the call for the audition for That Thing You Do!—basement theatre.
Craig and I had auditioned for a one-act play festival and wound up getting in but the guy didn’t like our play. So, he had us do the scene from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci says, “You think I’m funny?” It was so embarrassing. We did it. But it was so embarrassing to do this as a part of a one-act play festival with people who were doing one-acts that were terrible. We were laughing. We were drinking before the performance. We thought, “If this guy—the guy that put this together—can put a one-act play festival together in this space and charge money for tickets, why can’t we?” So, we did. We mounted a play and found a space and rented it out and did all of that, sold it out, made our money back. So, that’s my advice: Go out and do that. Go out with your friends, rent a space, pick a play, pay the copyright, make posters, go out at midnight and put your posters up where you’re not supposed to put ’em, and then put on your show. Feel great! Talk to your friends afterward in the lobby and do all of the fun theatre things that come with it and then see what comes from there. We took our profit and wound up renting that space in the basement and ended up working with writers. We did a couple of established plays, but they were obscure. We didn’t want to do anything standard. We didn’t want to be a “cover band,” we always said. They weren’t always great plays, but we felt they were great because they were ours. We were supporting each other and this was our clubhouse.
This interview was conducted on February 15, 2005, and it originally appeared in Acting Qs: Conversations with Working Actors by Bonnie Gillespie and Blake Robbins, available at Amazon.