'Severance' burning questions: Gemma, Helly, Mark and that maze of hallways
The mind-bending Apple TV+ series "Severance" sparks questions – lots of them! – about what's going on at Lumon Industries, the mysteriously oppressive workplace that offers to "sever" the consciousness of employees so they have no memory of their personal lives while at work, and vice versa.
As viewers of Season 2 (new episodes streaming Fridays; finale is out March 21) already know, things have gotten complicated as the "innie" and "outie" worlds have collided for our four main characters, led by Mark S. (Adam Scott), Helly R. (Britt Lower), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) and Irving B. (John Turturro). In Friday's seventh episode, focused on Mark's once-thought-dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), Sandra Bernhard and Robby Benson are added to the mix as a Lumon "nurse" and "doctor" evaluating the imprisoned Gemma as a "reintegrated" Mark tries to rescue her from the evil corporation.
We can't answer all those questions (can anyone?), but Scott and director/executive producer Ben Stiller unraveled some of them in recent interviews.
Did Adam Scott really run through that maze of hallways?
The Byzantine array of hallways on the "Severance" soundstage in the Bronx took some navigation since nearly all of the running you see is authentic.
Stiller says the maze has "intentionally always been confusing for people who work" at Lumon, but the same goes for the actors playing them. "That's Adam running, for real," Stiller says. "He was doing his full-on best Tom Cruise impersonation."
Sometimes, as for the lengthy shoot for the opening scene of Season 2, Scott needed fortification: Bananas and Gatorade. "I was cramping up; it was ridiculous." He figures the 10 sections of hallway constructed could add up to a mile.
Even still, "there's enough there that you can easily get lost. Patricia (Arquette) and I get lost the most, because they're constantly moving them around, depending on what they're shooting." The macrodata refinement office sits in the middle, so to get there, "it's like 'The Shining': you find yourself at a dead end and you have to just stop and yell and have someone come get you."
How does Mark's relationship with Helly affect his quest to find Gemma?
The blooming romance between Mark and Helly comes just as Mark's convinced that Lumon concealed that his wife Gemma is alive. But he's not always seeing clearly.
"Helly really turned Mark's world upside down," Scott says. "Before she came in, Mark was leading a life of servitude, happily. And he even felt like, within the boundaries of his life and what had been put in front of him, he had a little bit of a rebellious streak, and was able to carve out an identity there, particularly with his friend Petey," Scott says.
Early in the series, "they had this kind of proto-cynical attitude, bouncing around the office thinking that they had perspective on who they were and what they were doing." But "Helly just sort of turned all of that upside down, and the fundamental faith and belief that Mark had in Lumon was shaken" as Mark was "becoming aware of his surroundings and becoming disillusioned with everything that he had experienced. Season 2 is about him taking a little bit more control, and part of that is really slowing down and feeling these feelings for Helly that he maybe didn't know what to do with early on. The freedom to fall in love is maybe the most radical act that they've allowed themselves to really dive into, and that's where you start really defining what it is that you want, what it is you want to protect and what you think the world should be."
But "there was disillusion within the relationship too," Scott says, when Mark finds out halfway through the season that Helly's "outie" is Helena Eagan, the daughter of Lumon's chairman, "and is then unsure who this person actually is. But I think the love between them sort of transcends all of that."
Did Adam Scott struggle to play two versions of Mark?
"My kneejerk was to think about it as two different characters, but then as we were diving into it we realized it was important that it feel like the same guy: maybe different sections or halves, but very much the same person," Scott says. "Almost like how you behave differently if you're visiting home with people you've known your whole life or at a party where it's all complete strangers. You have these different sort of personas, we all do, that we switch in and out of depending on our surroundings."
But especially in Season 2, when Mark seeks "reintegration" of his severed halves, it "becomes more complicated, almost like a math problem. One of them has 40-odd years of life experience and everything that goes with a really full life, with sorrow and joy and memory of childhood, and is sort of weighed down by all of that. The other part of him, the innie, is for all intents and purposes 2⅟₂ years old. He's more naive, and his belief system is still developing."