The second season of Severance opens with Mark Scout (Adam Scott) running madly through the all-white corridors of the mysterious tech company for which he works, Lumon. He zigs and he zags, turning left, turning right, turning back the way he came. Finally, he finds what he’s looking for: the Wellness room, where he (presumably) hopes to find the wife (Australian-Tibetan actress Dichen Lachman) he had thought was dead but now believes to be alive.
Watching this frantic and wordless scenario, the phrase that comes to mind is “rat in a maze”. And that, admits John Turturro, who plays Mark’s colleague Irving Bailiff, is sometimes how the actors felt while making it.
“You are put in certain kinds of situations at times that are close to being a lab rat, especially in the first season,” he says.
Much of that is down to the production design. Those endless white corridors – shot inside a studio space so large that it could take the actors 10 minutes or more to get from trailer to set – and bland, wide-open office spaces are integral to creating a sense that the corporation is all, the individual nothing. And that is what Severance is, at heart, all about.
The team has a new and impossibly young supervisor, Miss Wong (Sarah Bock).Credit: Apple TV+
Created by Dan Erikson and produced (and often directed) by Ben Stiller, the show is a takedown of the cult-like devotion that some companies expect, and perhaps demand, of their employees.
Lumon’s secret sauce is that it has developed a brain procedure, known as severance, that allows the employee’s work and domestic lives to be made fully discrete.
In theory, that makes for greater productivity at work and greater serenity at home. In practice, it makes for a fractured sense of self, and a growing suspicion that the Lumon dream is a bit of a lemon.
“I think Helly R is on that journey of questioning what the hell is going on, and kind of providing the voice of reason for the audience as she’s discovering the strangeness of the world,” says Britt Lower of her character, whom we first met as she awoke, dazed and confused, on a boardroom table at the start of season one.
Lower is speaking, though, only of her Innie, the part of Helly’s identity that toils in the lower levels of Lumon HQ (the exterior shots are of a bona-fide Modernist masterpiece, the former Bell Labs building in New Jersey designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, which was opened in 1962 and was home to more than 6000 workers).
From left: Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry) venture outside for the first time, in a strange team-building exercise.Credit: Apple TV+
As revealed in the finale of season one, Helly’s Outie is the heir apparent of Lumon, and determined to push the controversial procedure to which her Innie is so vehemently opposed.
Not all workers are so troubled by severance, though. Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan George, the fourth member of this workplace quartet, says his Innie “didn’t know and didn’t really care” about the bigger picture in season one, until his complacency was pierced. In season two, he says, “it has been very exciting to learn more about his Outie and see how that impacts his Innie, and see that growth and change, and see the world expand”.
The events of season two are all predicated on the rupture at the end of season one, in which Dylan manages to trigger an “overtime contingency”, through which the Innie consciousnesses of Mark, Helly and Irving briefly become present in the outer world.
Once seen through these eyes, nothing will ever be quite the same again. But that doesn’t mean it’s an act of pure liberation.
For Turturro’s character in particular, realising that the cult of Lumon isn’t all it’s cracked up to be is a hugely unsettling experience.
“He comes from a very formal military background, and he really embraces that,” the actor says of Irving, who is homosexual and develops feelings for a co-worker (Christopher Walken), which is strictly forbidden. “That’s what fractures him, when [Lumon] doesn’t approve of how he feels. That’s why he’s so shattered.
“Personally, I’m really afraid of cults,” Turturro adds. “There’s buildings of certain groups, which I don’t want to mention, and I literally cross the street … just thinking of someone grabbing me or trying to get me into that is a nightmare for me.”
In season two, we delve deeper into the cultish aspects of Lumon, the stories and mythos of the founder, Kier Eagan, and the all-encompassing philosophy enshrined in the tomes he left behind.
Creepy doesn’t even begin to cut it. And with the show’s overarching white aesthetic, worship of a dead founding “genius”, and prevalent use of sans serif fonts, it’s hard not to be put in mind of a certain tech company from the real world … the very same company that commissioned this show.
“Well, we’re gonna let you …,” begins Turturro, laughing, when I float the idea that Lumon is a little, well, Apple-like. Besides, he reminds me, Ericksen wrote the show, drawing on his own non-creative working life, purely on spec. (The script made its way to Stiller’s production company around 2017, but Apple’s streaming service didn’t launch until November 2019.)
If the first season of Severance was largely about its main characters coming to realise something was amiss, the second is about what they do with that knowledge, both inside the company and outside. And for the actors, that meant playing two versions of the one person, each alike and different in subtle ways.
“It’s a real delight to figure out those nuances,” says Lower. “The parts of the same person sound different in my head, almost like different types of music played by the same band.”
Duality is a key theme in the show, and for Britt Lower, playing the two sides of Helly is a treat.Credit: Apple TV+
“Dan had ideas for who our characters were,” says Turturro. “Maybe not for everybody, but he gave me a whole sheaf of pages he typed up, things that I could look into and research. His whole background, his whole life that led him to being severed. That’s not really completely explained, except that he has some military background.”
How important is it to have that kind of material, even if it never fully manifests on screen?
“It’s important for me. Sometimes I learn something I would have never thought of before. Sometimes I enjoy it more than doing the job,” he laughs. “You get to interview people, learn about what they do and why they are the way they are. It’s fantastic. You’re making your own little documentary.”
For all involved, season one of Severance felt like an enormous risk, a show about office life that landed just as people were deciding they could do without offices in their lives, a workplace drama that was darkly funny, or a workplace comedy that was seriously dark. But it landed, and how: nominated for 14 Primetime Emmy Awards (it won two, for music and title design), it was one of Apple TV+’s biggest shows, and made plenty of year-end best-of lists in 2022.
Making the second season was a different prospect, says Lower.
“When we were filming season one I didn’t have any idea how people would receive this strange little office that we had built,” she says. “To see how it’s been received gave us all a boost of confidence when we were filming season two, and a sense that we really needed to build the bridge from this cliffhanger ending to the other side of the cliff with a lot of care and intrigue.”
That they’ve done, in spades. But for every question that’s answered in season two, another one pops up.
They may have built a bridge, in other words, but mind that gap.
Severance season 2 is on Apple TV+ from January 17
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