The Meryl Streep of millennial stupidity, Seann William Scott has rarely encountered a point he couldn’t majestically miss, or a cup of bodily waste he couldn’t guzzle down with aplomb. “I’m trying to think if I’ve ever played an intelligent person,” the actor muses. Dude, Where’s My Car? No chance. Role Models? Road Trip? Nah, not there. All four of his American Pie movies? Debatable, he insists. “I never really thought of Stifler as being dumb,” he says, of the horny jock whose various gross-out set pieces have since been clipped, compressed and posted to YouTube with titles like “Stifler the orgasm donor” or “Stifler eats poop”. “I saw him more as somebody who just wanted to be loved.”
Scott more or less defined American comedy 25 years ago, playing the handsome yet rubber-faced goof in a host of movies that were ribald and scatalogical for their first two-thirds, then sweetly sentimental after that. “I would say, a good 95 per cent of the movies I’ve done, I’ve played a total moron,” he jokes. It was an era of trippy, MTV-brained genre hopping, and jokes designed to make you hurl. Tom Green was a leading man. So, too, was Scott for a while, in things like Ivan Reitman’s goofy Evolution, the cult Canadian ice hockey comedy Goon, or the Dukes of Hazzard movie. And then he seemed to drop off the map a little – but only because comedies did as well.
