Adam Scott has an Emmy-nominated drama, a three-decade résumé and a new thriller opposite one of the most decorated actors alive. None of it, he says, has cured him of being a fan.

Scott stopped by Dear Chelsea, the iHeartRadio podcast hosted by Chelsea Handler with co-host Catherine Law, to talk about The Whisper Man, the new thriller in which he plays a struggling single father whose son disappears — with Robert De Niro playing his father, alongside Michael Keaton and Michelle Monaghan, directed by James Ashcroft. What he mostly talked about was how completely De Niro undid him.

"I was nervous the whole time," Scott said. "I did not get used to being around him at all."

The De Niro shrine started in a Northern California bedroom

Scott grew up in a small town far from the industry, and he kept his ambitions to himself. "I kept my ambition to be an actor a secret till I was like seventeen years old, because it was so embarrassing that I wanted to," he told Handler. "It sounded ridiculous, but it's all I thought about."

What he thought about most was De Niro. He cut the actor's photos out of Premiere magazine for his school locker and his bedroom wall. Then it escalated.

"I had a picture of him on the CD tray that came out of my CD player, so the him from Cape Fear would come out at you when the tray opened," Scott said. "People would be like, 'What are you doing? You need to calm down about Robert De Niro.'"

Decades later, the kid with the Cape Fear CD tray was being directed into scenes with the man himself. "He's so fundamental to the reasons that I wanted to do this in the first place," Scott said. "So it's still kind of blowing my mind. I don't think I'll ever get used to it."

His wife had to remind him he was the lead

The nerves got specific. Scott had a question about The Irishman he wanted to ask, and he workshopped it over the phone with his wife, producer Naomi Scott, like a man planning a heist.

"I was like, 'Hey, so I was thinking, I have this question about The Irishman, and I wanted to ask Bob about it, and I think tomorrow we're working together, I think I might find a chance to approach him,'" he recalled.

Naomi's response cut through it: "'Adam, you are starring in a movie with him. You're not like an extra or you have one scene. You can ask him about The Irishman. What are you doing?'"

He asked. De Niro said, "Yeah, great."

"He's actually such a sweet, accessible person, is what you come to find out," Scott said. "But I never ever got used to it."

On "Severance," the innie is his best self and the outie is everything he hates about himself

Handler pushed Scott on the mechanics of playing Mark S. — two versions of one man, separated by an elevator ride — and he laid out the math plainly.

"It's not like two characters. It sort of is, but it is the same person. It's just two different sections of the same person," he said. The difference he landed on was life experience: one version is in his forties, the other is "for all intents and purposes, like two and a half years old."

Then he got more personal about it. "Maybe the innie is everything I like about myself — like sometimes I can be charming or personable or optimistic," Scott said. "And then the outie could be everything I have disdain for about myself: a bad posture, kind of a pessimist, anti-social, all those things that you are constantly pushing up against."

That, he said, is why the shift reads in the elevator: "There's something just behind the eyes that shifts, because it's just a completely different life experience."

Handler flagged the widower streak

Scott plays a grieving husband in Severance and a grieving husband in The Whisper Man, which Handler declined to let slide. "We have to make sure that this doesn't become a recurring —"

"It stops here," Scott said.

He was drawn to The Whisper Man, he said, precisely because it refuses the tidy version of single parenthood. "This is a single dad who's kind of struggling. He wasn't the one — his wife was really the one who did the lion's share of parenting," Scott said. "It wasn't like some idyllic version of single parenthood. Things are a bit of a struggle out of the gate, and so this horrible thing that happens couldn't have come at a worse time."

Working with his 10-year-old co-star reminded him of a stage he misses. Scott's own kids with Naomi are 19 and 17. "They're essentially adults," he said. "It's a particularly tender, tender time" — and the worry never lifts: "Every time my kids leave the house, it's like, oh my god."

Asked whether his kids respect him, Scott didn't hesitate: "Oh my god, no."

He gives Naomi the credit for how they turned out. "I would always follow Naomi's lead. I think she is an incredible parent," he said. "I'm consistently still just blown away by what an incredible mother she has been." He also copped to being a nightmare himself: his mother once carried his dirty dishes into his bedroom and set them on his bed, and he moved them to the floor. "What an asshole."

She left the bar as soon as she found out he was an actor

The couple met at the Cat & Fiddle in Los Angeles, back "because everyone smoked back then," Scott said. He spotted Naomi across the patio, got a mutual friend to introduce them — and she bailed immediately.

"Naomi said, like, 'Nice to meet you,' and then she's like, 'I have to go,' and she just left, because she heard I was an actor and immediately was like, no way."

Handler's verdict: "Smart."

He got her to a closing-night performance of the play he was doing at the Mark Taper Forum instead. They ended up in a backyard at an after-party with a golden retriever, talking for three hours. They've been producing together since about 2012.

The Tom Cruise thing, and the running

Handler opened by telling Scott he looks like Tom Cruise, a comparison he says has quietly expired. "People used to say it all the time, like a long time ago, and then it sort of stopped," he said. "So I wonder if there's an era of Tom Cruise where we kind of matched up for a couple of years."

He does not, however, claim the running. "I don't think I've ever dedicated as much of myself to anything as he does to running," Scott said of Cruise, whom he called "the best cinematic runner of all time." After his own Severance hallway sprints, "I'm depleted and, like, bananas and Gatorade after I do it."

For the record, Scott's pick for the greatest American band is R.E.M. — "I think they're the best American band" — and he was an extra in one of their videos in 1992.

The advice segment got heavier

Scott stuck around for listener calls, including one from a 53-year-old woman who had cut off her 85-year-old mother over politics and wanted to know whether repairing it would mean compromising her values. Handler advised her to lead with love and take politics off the table entirely, and Scott agreed that the disagreement isn't the kind families used to have.

"I had friends that were Republicans back in those days, and it was so much simpler. It was a disagreement on politics," he said. "It is different, though. It's a disagreement about fundamental truths and about reality."

His read on why evidence doesn't land: "He turns the truth into a political position. He's convinced everyone that the truth is a far-left radical political position."

His closing note to Handler was warmer. "We've run into each other a bunch over the years, and you're always so kind and so cool and funny," Scott said. "I'm glad we finally got to sit down and chat."

The Whisper Man is streaming on Netflix. New episodes of Dear Chelsea — a production of iHeartMedia — drop weekly, with full video episodes and minisodes on Netflix.

Michelle Fay