Adam Scott reveals Aubrey Plaza’s note after first ‘Parks and Rec’ read

Why be boring and welcome someone to the cast of your show with a gift basket, when you could slip them a haunting little note?

That’s exactly how Aubrey Plaza commemorated the occasion of Adam Scott joining the Parks and Recreation cast after his first table read. “I remember at the end of the table read I breathed an audible sigh of relief,” Scott revealed in Jim O’Heir’s new book Welcome to Pawnee: Stories of Friendship, Waffles, and Parks and Recreation. But then, “Aubrey came up to me and passed me a note that was folded up very tight.”

“Do you remember the movie Shutter Island where Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo go to the mental hospital, and I think someone passes them a note?” Scott continues. “At the time it was a famous moment that had just happened in a famous movie — and Aubrey’s note said ‘Run,’ just like in the movie. It was a perfect welcome note.”

One doesn’t have to know Plaza well to know her unique mix of madcap and deadpan humor. Not to mention her love of pranks. But it takes a mind as open as Scott’s to not be at least a little intimidated by an actor comfortable in her main role on a network sitcom warning you to scram before you’ve even taped your first scene. Even if it was meant clearly in jest, by way of its context in the zeitgeist.

Scott, fortunately, “was a big fan of the show, an avid watcher of it” by the time he got the call to audition, so he was more than familiar with Plaza, whom Parks showrunner Michael Schur calls an “agent of chaos” in Welcome to Pawnee.

Scott remembers “hearing about this Office spinoff for a while, and I think it was a year before I actually auditioned that I told my agent that I wanted to be part of it.” At the time, he had just finished shooting the second season of the Starz comedy Party Down, and was unsure how much to believe the rumors that the show would be cancelled. He also “auditioned for Mark originally,” the character played for two seasons by Paul Schneider.

Once he had it on good authority Party Down wasn’t going forward with a third season, and that Schur and Parks creator Greg Daniels had a new character in mind for him, Scott set his course for Pawnee and sailed full steam ahead.

Scott nailed his audition with ease and was rewarded with the plum role of Ben Wyatt, the dorky state auditor and former child mayor who becomes series the primary paramour of series lead Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler).

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In a 2011 interview with GQ, Scott revealed that he “actually auditioned for the show before it was even on the air” but “kind of blew it.” His first audition was for a character named Josh, who was designed as the love interest for Rashida Jones’s Ann. That role likely developed into Mark, who did serve as Ann’s main squeeze and whom Scott confirms auditioning for in Welcome To Pawnee.

In a fascinating bit of Parks lore, Nick Offerman, who eventually landed the main role of Ron Swanson, the Parks department’s grouchy director, also auditioned for Josh, as he revealed in his 2015 memoir Paddle Your Own Canoe. It’s difficult to imagine a Parks and Recreation without Scott, with Offerman as Mark, and Schneider nowhere to be found.