Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for Severance Season 2 Episodes 1-6.
Apple TV+’s Severance initially premiered with a lot of questions for viewers, but none may have been as big as the one that dropped during the Season 1 finale, after the Macrodata Refinement team rebelled against Lumon Industries by triggering the Overtime Contingency, activating their innies in the outside world. Once Mark’s (Adam Scott) innie realizes that his outie’s wife, Gemma (Dichen Lachman), is not only alive, but also just so happens to be Lumon wellness counselor “Ms. Casey,” the clock starts ticking in terms of that bombshell reveal being successfully transferred from one side of his severed consciousness to the other. Season 2 doesn’t waste any time in allowing Mark’s outie to learn the truth, but in typical Severance fashion, the answer to one question sparks a ton more questions — like what Lumon is really doing to Gemma, and why.
Ahead of the show’s long-awaited return, Collider had the opportunity to speak with several cast and crew about some of Season 2’s most game-changing moments, including Adam Scott and Severance director and producer Ben Stiller. Over the course of the interview, which you can watch above or read below, Scott and Stiller discuss why Season 2 resolves the Season 1 finale so quickly, the very cold experience of filming the ORTBO in Episode 4, how they approached the staging and directing of Mark’s reintegration process on-screen, and more.
COLLIDER: Ben, from a directorial standpoint, was there anything about Season 2 that was more freeing in terms of getting to push boundaries further or taking risks in terms of your approach to episodes?
BEN STILLER: Yeah. I felt like if we were going to keep going with the show, it was important to expand the horizons of the show and take chances and not have the show play it safe in terms of the environment that we felt comfortable in — and, at the same time, hopefully, keep the feeling of what the show is that the people like. But I felt like we couldn’t stand still with it, so it was really fun to explore that and to think about where we could go in pushing the boundaries, tonally, even, and trying to play with some stuff, all in service of, hopefully, keeping the show moving forward and evolving, and keeping the audiences on their toes a little bit as to what they might expect.
In terms of story momentum, Adam, Season 2 doesn’t really wait long before giving us some sort of payoff with the Gemma reveal at the end of Season 1. How does that impact his outie and his decision, ultimately, to start the reintegration process?
ADAM SCOTT: The fact that Season 1 ended with Mark’s innie discovering this explosive piece of information, and then Season 2 starts with his reaction to it, it’s only a matter of time before that information somehow gets to his outie. So, by the time it reaches him, it’s a complete world shifter. I think it takes a little while. It was important to us because the information of his wife actually still being alive is so outlandish and crazy. It had to be something that needed to be told to him maybe a few times and then double-confirmed before he’s anywhere near believing something like this. So when it actually finally lands, it’s something that turns his world upside down, and sure, he’ll do anything he can to find his way back to her.
STILLER: We felt like that was an important moment. At one point during the development process, we thought about it coming later, but then we thought, “This is an important engine for the season.”
‘Severance’s Ben Stiller Reveals His Visual Influences for Depicting Reintegration in Season 2

It kicks off this reintegration procedure, which as we see, there’s a lot of buildup to him actually getting his head essentially drilled into. Visually, the show is doing a really interesting thing with this, and memories of both sides overlapping, and how that’s depicted. A lot of that comes together in the edit, but from a directing standpoint, how do you play with that and figure out how to film those sequences?
STILLER: For me, I look to films and filmmakers who’ve done that really well. I draw a lot of inspiration from Michel Gondry and Chris Nolan, who I think are just incredibly good at creating visual effects sequences that don’t feel like they’re visual effects. We actually don’t really use hardly any visual effects for those sequences. It’s more about shooting the different environments, the sort of permutations of Mark on the table in the conference room, Mark on the table in the conference room in his basement, Mark and his innie on the table in the conference room in his basement, Mark and his outie. We do all the different permutations for real, and then it’s just a matter of cutting them together in the editing room. That’s something we’re building off of from the first season. I think Uta Briesewitz, one of our directors, did really beautiful work with that, and Sam Donovan, too, in Episodes 5 and 6. We just continued that language, and it’s been fun to explore it.

10:41

Related

“I Don’t Know If I’ll Be Able To Watch It”: ‘Severance’s John Turturro, Britt Lower, and Zach Cherry on the Shrinking Divide Between Innie and Outie in Season 2

They also discuss freezing while filming the ORTBO episode and how Irving’s firing impacts MDR.

Episode 4 is a turning point for these characters in the story in a lot of ways, but it also marks an opportunity to get this group out of the office through Lumon’s take on a team-building retreat. I wanted to ask where you filmed that, and secondly, how cold was it during filming?
STILLER: We went to Siberia. No, we shot that in Upstate New York, where we shoot a lot of the show, and it was winter. We were fortunate enough to be blessed with a couple of very timely snowfalls that, these days, are few and far between. We were really lucky to have that. It was kind of a bonding experience for everybody. We were up there for about six weeks. You guys were out there for about maybe four weeks.
SCOTT: The actors would get to set, and we would drive all the way up to where cars can no longer go, and then we would get into these snow vehicles — they weren’t snowmobiles, they were snowcats — and then just go straight up a mountain for 20 minutes until we got to our base camp at the top of the mountain. That’s where we were for 12 hours shooting every day. It was a true adventure. And yes, it was very cold, but so fun and so crazy. We were doing it just for a month straight up there. It was amazing.
STILLER: The cave where they find the book was like a 15-minute hike because we couldn’t have vehicles go through the woods and stuff. So yeah, it was a fun adventure for everybody.
SCOTT: Every time you started feeling sorry for yourself when you’re hiking to a location, you would look and see our incredible camera crew carrying insanely heavy equipment.
New episodes of Severance Season 2 premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.

Severance

Release Date

February 18, 2022

Showrunner

Dan Erickson, Mark Friedman

Writers

Dan Erickson