SEVERANCESEVERANCE
AS HIS MYSTERIOUS DRAMA ABOUT WORK/LIFE BALANCE RETURNS, BEN STILLER TELLS US THINGS ARE ABOUT TO GET EVEN STRANGER
WORDS AMELIA TAIT
Top to bottom:
Mark Scout (Adam Scott) with one hell of a stress ball; Irving Bailiff (John Turturro) makes a call; The inscrutable Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette); Director Ben Stiller on set.
Alamy
Most of the actors in
Severance
play two parts — an ‘innie’ trapped at work and an ‘outie’ in the real world. But by the end of Season 1, we’ve seen some of the barriers between them break down…
The idea that was set up at the end of the first season was that Mark [Adam Scott] finds out his wife’s alive, and that is a main drive of the second season —he’s trying to find his wife. To me what’s interesting about the show is an innie and an outie having to deal with each other and having to reconcile different objectives. Any time there’s a situation that is like, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in any other show,” that’s what we’re going to go for.