“Somebody on Twitter once wrote of me, and it was a friend who sent this, ’Whoever the hell this guy is, he’s really cornered the market on inept bad guys,” says Scott MacArthur. “That made me laugh.”
It’s been an hour into an April coffee with the actor and writer, and the conversation is only just turning to his career. The anonymous assessment of his earlier work holds some water. MacArthur’s been the kidnapping welder in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, the blackmailing stuntman in The Righteous Gemstones and, perhaps most memorably, the lovable dirtbag boyfriend to Kaitlin Olson’s character in cult Fox comedy The Mick. But before getting to all of that, or the hat trick of jobs that have made the Running Point actor hard to avoid in recent months, MacArthur first had to talk through some dog problems. Moose, his 18-month-old Ridgeback, has been picking fights with much larger peers in the local dogpark. MacArthur seems a bit concerned he may have waited too long to neuter the family pet.
“Oh, God, you got into the Moose of it all?” asks Kate Hudson when I recount the conversation. “Did he share that… I don’t know if it’s my place to say…”
His Running Point co-star is alluding to a 2025 incident, during which MacArthur came home to discover that Moose had sniffed out the box containing the ashes of the previous family dog and devoured some of his predecessor — as MacArthur puts it, “He hoovered the ashes like he was Scarface” — before spreading the rest around the living room. “Scotty is filled with stories, I just don’t know how many of them are real — maybe two thirds,” says Hudson. “But he is one of the smartest, most wonderful, talented people and collaborators I’ve worked with. I think he deserves the world.”
Perhaps the world is catching up. After years of maybe a few too many of those inept roles, MacArthur has been booking a colorful run. The second season Running Point, a Netflix comedy about a family-run basketball team and loosely inspired by the life of Jeanie Buss, sees him acting opposite on-screen sibling Hudson. MacArthur recurs in Steve Carell HBO comedy, Rooster, as a drunk hockey coach. And, most recently, he’s making a rare genre turn as a period gangster opposite Brendan Gleeson and Nicolas Cage in Amazon’s Spider-Noir. Being a journeyman actor, as he explains it over the better part of a morning at a Venice Beach cafe, has been the kind of prep he needed.
“There’s something empowering to being kind of a wanderer,” says MacArthur, who lives on the westside with his wife and two children. “There is a resilience that gets built up during that time. It’s a fortitude that you get from working a lot, whether it’s seen or not. You just have to keep going.”
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A Chicago native, MacArthur had his obligatory stints studying at Second City and Improv Olympic. But his trajectory might be best informed by time playing college sports in the northeast where he was a backup goalie in both hockey and lacrosse. “You want your team to win, and generally that means the guy who’s playing goalie is doing well,” says MacArthur. “But you’re in the weight room every morning and at practice every afternoon. You’re dedicating a huge chunk of your life. Of course, you want to play!”
This irked him for a spell, but then he discovered there were other ways he could be valuable. He became comic relief in the locker room, in the hotels and on bus rides home after a loss. His antics prepped him for a career in comedy, though not as much getting called up from the bench.
MacArthur was originally just a writer on The Mick. Nat Faxon played his character, Jimmy, in the 2016 pilot. But the project was in second position for Faxon, so when Fox ordered it to series, the part needed to be recast. It helped that MacArthur had been the one who’d written the actual audition material. History repeated itself two years ago. Sort of. Running Point was created by Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen, three of MacArthur’s past collaborators — the latter two of them longtime friends from back in Chicago. The role of Ness Gordon, the general manager to Hudson’s president of fictional basketball team the Los Angeles Waves, was originally intended to be played by Barinholtz. But when his part on Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Studio became a conflict, the trio called on MacArthur.
“Almost everything I’ve ever done, I’m not the first choice,” says MacArthur. “But I do believe I was my wife’s first choice.”
When Bill Lawrence was searching for someone funny who could ice skate to fill the recurring role on Rooster, the series’ co-creator found that to be a surprisingly tall order in Hollywood. Some scheduling stars aligned, as did the fact that Running Point and Rooster share a writer-producer in Stassen, and MacArthur was able to moonlight on the high-profile comedy.
“I called Stassen and I was, ‘Dude, you’ve got to let me keep using him,’ says Lawrence. “Watching him work with Steve Carell was such a joy. When two people are that quick, they just vibe off of each other.”
Spider-Noir required has different kind of muscle for MacArthur. He had to manage fight choreography and some new grizzled accent work — ”We all sounded like we’d been chewing on batteries for months.” His most stressful moment of production was over almost immediately. “The first night on the set is me doing a fight scene with Nicolas Cage,” he says. “I had to pull a punch without hitting him in the face.”
MacArthur now joins Cher in the storied ranks of performers to throw hands at Nic
olas Cage on screen — and Cage wouldn’t be the last icon he’d flirt with marring.
MacArthur also got the perk of spending his down time trying to absorb as much wisdom as he could from his most frequent scene partner. It was the Oscar-nominated Gleeson who offered some comforting perspective about the dog ashes incident, suggesting, at least in MacArthur’s version of Gleeson’s Irish accent, that it was simply the new dog’s way of assuming his place in the family.
In January, production began on Netflix feature comedy The Fifth Wheel. The film has already garnered quite a lot of attention for its premise (a trio played by Nikki Glaser, Brenda Song, Fortune Feimster are joined their unlikely friend, Kim Kardashian, on roadtrip to Las Vegas) and pedigree (Paula Pell and Janine Brito wrote the script), but what the early coverage has overlooked is the fact that MacArthur makes an appearance as a hibachi chef — and he went all in.
“We had some conversations about whether or not the character was good at hibachi,” he explains. “From the acting point of view, even if you’re going to be bad at something, you want to try to get as good at it as you can and then dial it down.”
YouTube tutorials were interesting but hard 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 really didn’t want to send a spatula the wrong way while filming with Kardashian and his Running Point co-star, Song.
“The day of the shoot, Kim and Brenda are sitting in front of me, and I’m thinking, ‘You are now flipping a spatula and a death fork four feet from, arguably, the most famous face on earth. Don’t fuck this up,” says MacArthur. “I never went wire to wire. I had a couple of drops and that bummed me out, but on the drive home, I did have a flash of that Gleason perspective where I thought, ‘Hey man, you didn’t cut her. That’s the win.’”
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A month after the coffee, I give MacArthur a call, in part to see if there’s a Moose update. “He’s clipped, but it didn’t do a damn thing,” he says. “He’s a maniac, but I guess that’s a good thing, right? Gives us all hope.”
There has been been better news on other fronts. Running Point has been renewed for a third season. There’s another gig he thinks he’s going to pan out. He and his The Mick collaborators, Dave and John Chernin, are working on a script. And even though he downplays his efforts on The Fifth Wheel, joking he will probably be edited down to just 30 seconds, his commitment to hibachi echoes something many around him point out.
“Yes, he’s funny, but he puts his heart in everything,” says Hudson. “Scotty’s very serious about art.”
He’s not just here for “inept bad guys.” And the industry might have finally come around to that.
“I would hope that there’s a lot of sides to me that the general public hasn’t seen,” says MacArthur. “I’m educated! I’m well traveled! And my poor mother is still waiting for me to be a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy.”
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