In late 2012, Dan Erickson was a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring screenwriter in L.A., working a dull job in office management at a door-parts company. Day after day, he sat at a computer monitor cataloguing hinges and cabinet pulls. He longed to escape the drudgery, but he needed the money; he was saddled with debt, and drove a dinky scooter to save on gas. One morning, while walking into work, Erickson had a thought: What if I could skip ahead to the end of the day, and my work would magically be done? During his lunch breaks, he began turning this idea into a pilot for a high-concept workplace thriller called “Severance.” The result was part “The Office,” part “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” A sinister corporation called Lumon Industries has invented a microchip brain implant that can bisect a person’s consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie”—an office self and a home self. Lumon employees who choose to have the implant installed work on a subterranean “severed floor” of Lumon’s headquarters. The chip is activated as they ride an elevator down, erasing their knowledge of their outside lives. Their home selves, in turn, know nothing of what happens within the office’s walls. The show’s protagonist, Mark Scout, is a severed man toiling in Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Department, sorting numbers into arbitrary groupings. Outside the office, his outie is a bereft widower who chose to sever his mind just to get some emotional relief. At work, his innie is upbeat, affable, on task—and, like his severed co-workers, effectively trapped forever at the office, by design.
From the time Erickson began writing the script, he had the actor Adam Scott in mind for the role. Erickson had admired Scott’s performance in the hit NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” as Ben Wyatt, a geeky budget adviser who ultimately wins the heart of the show’s protagonist, the bubbly bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). “Parks,” along with the cult comedy series “Party Down,” about a group of failed actors turned cater waiters, helped establish Scott as an endearing version of TV’s working Everyman, whose sardonic veneer belies an inner core of hopeful sweetness. This métier has been defined, in part, by Scott’s physical appearance, which straddles the line between hunky and nondescript—medium height, slightly hangdog eyes, thick chestnut hair that juts like a cockatiel’s crest. As Michael Schur, the co-creator of “Parks,” put it to me, “He’s memorable in unmemorable parts.” “Severance,” an office dystopia, needed a guy regular enough to ground viewers in the rules of its heightened sci-fi world but intriguing enough to make you suspect that he’s more than a drone.
In 2015, the head of television at Red Hour, a production company run by the actor and director Ben Stiller, received Erickson’s pilot, which also made the BloodList, an online compendium of promising unproduced horror scripts. Stiller, who had previously directed both madcap film comedies (“Zoolander,” “Tropic Thunder”) and a dark television drama (“Escape at Dannemora”), immediately took to the concept, and he and Erickson began revising the script in 2016. With no awareness of Erickson’s casting idea, Stiller told me recently, he, too, concluded that Mark should be played by Adam Scott. Stiller and Scott had worked together briefly in 2013, when Scott had a small role as an office bully in Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” and they’d kept in touch. Stiller, who spent his own early career feeling pigeonholed as a tightly wound straight man in comedies like “Meet the Parents” and “There’s Something About Mary,” knew that Scott yearned to play more dramatically challenging characters. “There are actors like Bryan Cranston who get to go to another place when people see them in a certain role,” Stiller told me, referring to Cranston’s reputational leap from playing a sitcom dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” to a ruthless drug lord on “Breaking Bad.” “That’s what I felt with this.”
In January of 2017, Stiller called Scott and pitched him on the show. Scott read the script and loved it. “It felt too good to be true,” he told me recently. “I pretty much assumed it would disappear.” It nearly did. Stiller sold the show to Apple, which was preparing to launch a new streaming service, AppleTV+, and the same qualities that had made Erickson and Stiller want Scott—the sense that he could be anyone, that he could almost be overlooked—made him a harder sell to Apple. Executives were hesitant to cast him. Stiller refused to commit to an alternative, and a year of developmental stalemate ensued. Finally, Stiller sent Scott a late-night e-mail: Apple was open to considering him, but only if Scott agreed to tape an audition for the part he’d thought he already had. Stiller feared that Scott would consider this demeaning and walk. But Scott, who is now fifty-one, spent the first fifteen years of his career as a struggling actor, and even after the success of “Parks”—and a part on the popular HBO drama “Big Little Lies” (2017)—he’d maintained a swallow-your-pride mind-set. When Scott read Stiller’s e-mail, he was in a rental trailer in Atlanta, completing a shoot as the host of a short-lived ABC game show called “Don’t.” Scott said, “I remember sitting there thinking, Am I in any position to say ‘No, thanks’ to audition for probably the best pilot I’ve ever read?” He wrote back to Stiller “in, like, five seconds,” and after reading for the part he secured the job.
“Severance” premièred in February of 2022, to wide acclaim. Amid a glut of bloated, forgettable streaming shows, the series stood out for its amusingly stilted tone and retrofuturistic mise en scène, and for the psychological dimensions of its cryptic puzzle-box structure. In this magazine, Naomi Fry called it “sci-fi for the soul.” At a time when the pandemic was prompting people to interrogate their relationships to their workplaces, the show had a fortuitous claim to the Zeitgeist. In the Times, James Poniewozik wrote that it might be “the first great TV show of the Great Resignation.” (Lumon’s sleek office looked like a cross between a mid-century library and an Apple store, and there was a piquant irony in a tech giant producing a show that lampoons corporate surveillance.) The ensemble cast included veteran stars, among them John Turturro, Christopher Walken, and Patricia Arquette, as the viperous severed-floor boss. But Scott’s subtly humane performance as Mark was what Stiller calls the “beating heart” of the story. In 2022, Scott received his first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Scott is temperamentally resistant to admitting he’s had success. When I first met him, for lunch at a hipster pizza place in L.A.’s Studio City, in November, two months before the première of “Severance” Season 2, he told me that he still worries he’s “not very good” as an actor. “And that’s not in a showy way, like how ‘impostor syndrome’ has become this buzzword now and most people are using it to humblebrag,” he added. In person, as in some of his best-known roles, he speaks with a deadpan delivery that can seem self-protective, a ward against humiliation. When I asked him the secret to achieving his impressive hair volume, he answered flatly: “Propecia.” His style is haute dadcore—slim-cut khakis, waxed field jackets, pristine sneakers. Last summer, after he turned fifty, he bought an electric Porsche Taycan, then fretted that it made him look like a middle-aged cliché. (Whether he wanted to show off the car or just his nice-guy bona fides, he offered to drive me to my friend’s house after lunch.) He described the lead-up to “Severance” Season 1, when billboards featuring his face popped up all over Los Angeles, as one of the most stressful periods of his life. Every time he comes out with a new project, he told me, “my default position is to think it will either make zero noise or be embarrassing.” Weeks later, worried that complaining about being on billboards sounded “so gross,” he added, “The thing is, I live daily with the fear of anyone thinking I think I’m great.”
Ben from “Parks and Recreation” is an incorrigible pop-culture nerd, whose passions include nineties indie rock and Batman movies, complicated board games and fantasy series. In one scene that has become an Internet meme, an unemployed Ben spends three weeks making a three-second Claymation music video. When his close friend, played by Rob Lowe, suggests that he might be depressed, Ben brandishes a clumsy clay figurine of his likeness and asks, “Do you think a depressed person could make this?”
Ben’s interests and fixational tendencies were based partly on Scott’s. For the past decade, Scott has had a side gig as the co-host, with the comedian Scott Aukerman, of a popular music podcast, on which they (“Scott and Scott”) analyze the discographies of their favorite bands, one album at a time. The seasons have aggressively goofy names—“U Talkin’ U2 to Me?,” “U Springin’ Springsteen on My Bean?,” and the forthcoming “U Talkin’ Billy Joel 2 My E-Hole?”—but, as Jesse David Fox, who covers comedy for Vulture, put it to me, the humor of the show stems from Scott’s ability to “idle in neutral.” Fox added, “He’s a dude who loves this normie music, and he is unafraid to sound really, really boring or basic about it.” On the season “R U Talkin’ R.E.M. RE: ME?,” Scott divulged that in his R.E.M.-obsessed youth he’d been an extra in the music video for the band’s song “Drive.” In the time since, he’d scrolled through the video repeatedly, frame by frame, but could never find himself. A podcast listener trawled the footage and finally spotted him, beaming upward as Michael Stipe crowd-surfs overhead.
Scott grew up, in Santa Cruz, as the third and youngest child of divorced parents. He was what he described as a “chubby kid” who was bullied for his weight at school. He lived mostly with his mom, Anne, an artist and a special-education teacher, who didn’t own a television. But when Scott was nine years old his dad, Dougald, a biology professor at a community college, gave him a portable black-and-white TV set. Scott would watch shows at night in his bedroom—“The Twilight Zone,” “Late Night with David Letterman.” (“I found something so comforting in that dry, sardonic Midwestern stance,” he recalled.) After school, he’d loiter at a local video store, “reading the backs of the VHS boxes,” and he cultivated a budding identity as a film connoisseur. In high school, he hung a photograph of Martin Scorsese in his locker. After seeing Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” he grew a goatee and wore a Knicks hat for an entire year.
Scott lost his baby weight and made the water-polo team—which, in Santa Cruz, he told me, was more socially advantageous than playing football. During his sophomore year, a drama teacher caught him peeking into the school theatre and encouraged him to try out for a play. He was loath to jeopardize his new shot at popularity, but he agreed, and soon became single-minded about acting. He appeared in school productions of “Blue Denim” and “Guys and Dolls” and let his studies slip, to the point where he was put on academic probation. As a senior, with the kind of outsized confidence endemic among high-school thespians, he declared that he was moving to Hollywood to make it as an actor.
Scott enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in Pasadena, an acting school he chose, in part, because eligible applicants needed only a 2.0 G.P.A. He dreamed of becoming what he called a “serious actor, like Robert De Niro or Al Pacino.” During his second year, Scott briefly tried using the surname Quardero, a shortened version of his mother’s Sicilian maiden name, thinking that it might lend him similar actorly gravitas. “Adam Scott,” he told me, “sounds generic and fake.” He scribbled his new autograph several times on a piece of paper, but felt “totally embarrassed” and abandoned the moniker. (Later, after he made the mistake of telling this story to his castmates on “Party Down,” they began shouting “Quardero!” any time he’d film a scene that was even “slightly sincere.”) For a Gen X-er raised on movies that skewered phonies and wannabes, the thought of being a poser was, in the end, far more offensive to his sensibilities than being potentially bland. They say a name can be a kind of destiny, and there was no use outrunning his. “I was clearly meant to play the befuddled beta male,” he said.
While at the Academy, Scott met Paul Rudd, a recent graduate who had landed a Nintendo commercial right out of school, making him the program’s resident golden boy. (Scott, with a lingering trace of high-school jock, calls his male actor friends by their last names—Hamm, Bateman, Lowe. “Everyone knew Rudd,” he said.) The two men connected over their similar ambitions. Rudd told me, “We probably shared a bit of disdain for the fact that we were ‘struggling actors,’ and the clichés that come along with that.” Rudd did not have to struggle for long: in 1995, he scored his breakout role as the brainy love interest in the blockbuster teen comedy “Clueless.” Scott’s path, as Rudd delicately put it, “was a bit of a slower burn.”
Besides a brief stint as a busboy at Johnny Rockets, Scott told me, he has never worked a day job or a “regular nine-to-five.” But his early years in Hollywood gave him vivid experience of a certain kind of demoralizing grind. After finishing drama school, he signed with a small-time manager, and his life became a conveyor belt of auditions, rejections, and parts that ranged in size from bit to slightly less bit. He appeared on an MTV series called “Dead at 21,” and as a chest-wound victim on an episode of “ER.” He appeared in the background of a Tia Carrere music video, and made his film début, as an eighteenth-century dandy, in the horror sequel “Hellraiser: Bloodline.” He appeared in single episodes of the cop shows “NYPD Blue” and “High Incident.” He had a brief romantic arc as Neve Campbell’s crush on “Party of Five,” and a four-episode stint on “Boy Meets World.” “Maybe some of my peers thought ‘Boy Meets World’ was lame, or they were, like, ‘We don’t do TV,’ ” Scott told me, adding, “I’d do fucking whatever.” One especially humbling experience was an audition for the Western “Wild Bill,” starring Jeff Bridges. In the waiting room, Scott found dozens of other aspirants who looked like him, except they’d dressed for the part, in cowboy hats and riding gear, whereas he’d worn a flannel shirt and cut-off cargo pants. Flustered, he flubbed his read so badly that the director invited him to go again. When Scott left the room after his second try, he passed a young Matt Damon, waiting his turn. “I was, like, Yeah, Damon’s here, I’m not getting this one,” he said.
He owned a pager just so that his manager could alert him about auditions, and spent much of his time between jobs “sitting around in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and waiting for that beeper to go off.” He added, “I didn’t go on trips. I didn’t have any hobbies. I just stuck around and waited to be called to some rinky-dink office building to read a script.” He’d often go on five auditions a day, paying for gas with quarters he dug out from the ashtray of his beat-up Oldsmobile. His father remembers visiting Scott around this time and driving around with him between casting calls. “He had to keep getting out to change his clothes on the side of the road,” Dougald said. Scott lived for a while in a “crappy, creepy apartment” in Hollywood, right across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Center. The church was notorious for luring in young industry strivers; one of Scott’s good friends had joined. “I never went in for a stress test,” Scott joked, referring to the church’s infamous intake assessment. “I was already pretty aware of my stress level at all times.” At one point, he did visit a psychic, asking her why he had yet to land a plum role.
In 1998, Scott met his wife, Naomi, a producer, at a bar on Sunset Boulevard. Early in their relationship, she asked Scott if he had ever considered doing something besides acting. “My mom always said you should learn accounting, just in case,” she told me. “So I asked him—pretty flippantly, I now realize—what he would do if acting didn’t work out. And I remember him blanching. He’d never thought about it.” Scott told me that he considered giving up only once, when he narrowly missed getting a part in the HBO drama “Six Feet Under” that ultimately went to Michael C. Hall. He’d made it down to the final three. Losing the job, he recalled, “was a body blow.” A few years later, he got a call that he was up for a small role in “The Aviator,” a film by Scorsese, Scott’s idol from adolescence, as a wisecracking press agent for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes. To prepare, Scott grew a pencil mustache, rented a zoot suit, and studied classic screwball comedies. The morning of his audition, Naomi left a Post-it note on Scott’s mirror that read “Good luck. You deserve this!” Scott got the part, but the film did not turn out to be the big, career-launching break that he’d hoped for. Recounting Naomi’s faith in him during his protracted fallow period, Scott broke down in tears. Then he groaned and shook his head rapidly, like a dog sloughing off bathwater. “I cannot fucking believe I cried,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
One morning in November, Scott was at the headquarters of Great Scott, a production company that he and Naomi co-run. It occupies a wooden bungalow on the lot of Radford Studio Center, where “Parks and Recreation” was filmed. Scott and Naomi live close by, with their two teen-age children. They launched their company, originally called Gettin’ Rad, in 2012, with a series of classic-television spoofs for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block, and specialized in what Scott calls “quick and dirty” film and TV projects. They are currently producing an independent feature called “The Saviors,” which stars Scott as a “coddled dum-dum” who rents his guesthouse out to a couple he begins to suspect might be terrorists. Scott met me at the door, wearing a spotless white baseball cap and Sperry Top-Siders—“like David Byrne wears in ‘Stop Making Sense,’ ” he told me. “And, if you think that’s an accident, you’re insane.”
Inside, in an office he shares with Naomi, two identical white desks faced each other. The room was decorated with framed photographs of Scott—on the set of “Severance,” posing with his “Parks and Recreation” castmates in tuxedos, meeting Barack Obama—plus a large portrait of Barbra Streisand. “That’s all Naomi,” he said. A bookcase held a porcelain reproduction of his favorite snack, the kindergarten staple ants on a log. Scott told me that an assistant, who’d gifted him the sculpture, used to prepare it for him, but he was “mortified” when he caught her on the “Severance” set wearing surgical gloves and (in a task worthy of a Lumon employee) piping peanut butter onto celery sticks. He pointed out one of his most prized possessions: a lightsabre that was given to him by Mark Hamill as a surprise stunt on an episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” In a clip of the segment that went viral, Scott, visibly shaken, tells Hamill, “This really is one of the best moments of my life.” Scott’s fanboy identity can fit awkwardly with his rising stature in Hollywood. The night before he was supposed to shoot his first scene on “Severance” with Christopher Walken and John Turturro, he got so excited to see his name next to theirs on the call sheet that he stayed up until 4 A.M. The next morning, he overslept and arrived on set hours late. When he had the chance to meet Al Pacino, at a Vanity Fair Oscars party in 2022, he hid behind a potted palm tree. Pacino spotted him and approached, to say that he was a “Severance” fan.
Looking back, Scott said, he wonders if his reverence for dramatic actors made him miss the early signs of his affinity for comedy. He’d always loved the Albert Brooks film “Defending Your Life,” a warmly funny fantasy about an ad executive in the afterlife. What if Brooks, rather than Pacino, had been his lodestar? Scott’s acting career finally started to click when, with the help of Rudd’s connections, he began migrating toward comedic roles. Judd Apatow gave Scott a small part as a male nurse in “Knocked Up” (2007), which inspired the director Adam McKay, a friend of Apatow’s, to cast Scott in “Step Brothers” (2008), as an entitled antagonist of the titular siblings, played by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. At the age of thirty-four, Scott unearthed a new talent for portraying another familiar breed of dude, the smug asshole (a role he later reprised in both “The Good Place” and “Walter Mitty”).
In 2008, he got cast on “Party Down” when Rudd, who co-created the show, was too busy to star in it himself. “Party Down” had a colorful ensemble cast, including Megan Mullally and Jane Lynch, and was drolly astute about the service industry’s way of bringing the rich and famous into cringey contact with those who only aspire to be. But it got barely any attention during its initial two-season run on Starz; the series finale, which aired in the summer of 2010, received a 0.0 Nielsen rating. Over the following decade, however, the show acquired a cult following through DVDs and streaming, and a few years ago, bowing to fan demand, Scott’s company helped produce a six-episode reboot, released in 2023. Scott’s character, Henry Pollard, is a downtrodden actor who’d had a promising career until an appearance in a successful beer commercial torpedoed his credibility; he has since resigned himself to tending bar in a pink bow tie. In the show’s best running gag, strangers constantly accost him with the ad’s bro-y catchphrase: “Are we having fun yet?” Scott’s Henry is acerbic but attentive on the job—like Sam Malone from “Cheers” with a nihilistic streak—and has a flinty, self-critical edge informed by Scott’s own years of stymied ambition. He told me, “I realized that I could just pour all of my own insecurities into the character.” (Rudd, a sunny onscreen personality and a card-carrying movie star, might have been less persuasive in the role.)
Michael Schur, the “Parks” co-creator, was among the few people who actually saw “Party Down” when it first aired, and he thought Scott’s type would make a good love interest for Leslie Knope. Ben Wyatt appeared on a few episodes of the second season, and became a core character in the third. In a workplace of exaggerated oddballs, Ben served as the audience’s avatar, quietly tolerating his shambolic surroundings or glancing pleadingly at the camera like Jim in “The Office.” Poehler told me, of Scott’s fruitfully withholding presence as an actor, “He’s not an open-faced sandwich.” His chemistry with Poehler, as the base to Leslie’s kooky acid, made him a heartthrob among a certain breed of Type A viewer. BuzzFeed published lists swooning over the character, including “22 Reasons Why Ben Wyatt From ‘Parks And Rec’ Is Actually Your Soulmate.”
Scott said that his “comedy era” helped shape the way he thinks about acting over all. He recalled that, during a scene in “Party Down” in which Henry flirts with a fellow-caterer, played by Lizzy Caplan, the episode’s director, Fred Savage, told him that he was trying too hard: “He took me aside and was, like, ‘Listen, you’re the star of the show. You’re the guy that the audience is gonna go through this story with. You can just sit there and listen to this woman. You don’t have to do a bunch of stuff, or the audience is gonna get fried.’ ” Scott felt awakened to the comedic power of understatement. On “Severance,” many of the best scenes involve Mark’s innie—suit-clad, with a neat Beatles haircut—sitting passively at his desk, looking somehow both quizzical and nonchalant. His uncritical acceptance of Lumon’s eccentricities—the endless number sorting; the lame employee perks, including a midday “Music Dance Experience”; the fact that nobody can say what the company actually does—enhances their ominous absurdity. During Season 1, Mark’s innie peruses a sophomoric self-help book called “The You You Are,” and his face gradually brightens as he reads, his blunted mind blown open by dime-store enlightenment. When comedians play Everymen, their inner clowns often feel barely concealed. Jim Carrey’s suburban insurance salesman in “The Truman Show” is a milquetoast Mr. Rogers type until he discovers that his life is a televised ruse, after which Carrey lets loose flashes of Ace Ventura-ish schtick. Even Stiller’s meek male nurse in “Meet the Parents” eventually explodes like a shaken-up Sprite. By contrast, as Schur put it to me, Scott “is never over the top.” He added, of Scott’s performance as innie and outie Mark, “He had the opportunity to go big, and play these two wildly distinct characters. But he stayed small.”
This fall, Scott took on a new podcasting gig, as the co-host, with Stiller, of a show recapping “Severance” Season 1, called, plainly, “The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott.” On a recent Sunday afternoon, at the L.A. headquarters of the podcast company Pineapple Street, in Hollywood, Scott and Stiller sat across from each other in a studio, preparing to tape the first two episodes. They’d decided, the night before, to fly in Erickson, who’d been out of town visiting family, so that he and Jackie Cohn, a “Severance” producer, could serve as special guests. Whereas both Stiller and Scott are wiry and shipshape in their appearance, Erickson was stubbly and dressed in baggy jeans and Blundstones—the standard uniform of the rumpled screenwriter. By the time he and Stiller began developing “Severance,” he had quit the door-parts company and was doing Postmates deliveries on his scooter. The day he and Stiller pitched the show at Apple’s L.A. office, Erickson was broke enough that he took a Postmates order on his way home. He joked to me later, “I bring the working-class clout to this team. I’ve got street cred that these guys could only ever dream of.”
When recording began, Scott, leaning into a cantilevered microphone, introduced Erickson as “the big brain behind everything.”
“They’re bringing Dan’s brain in, in a jar, right now,” Stiller added. “There’ll be some sort of a technology hooked up directly to his medulla oblongata, too, and there’ll be a synthesized A.I. voice.”
Erickson said, with a nervous giggle, “I’m not thrilled with the voice you guys have picked for me, for my brain, my jar brain. I was told that John Turturro’s voice would be representing me.”
The podcast was a useful promotional push, partly because “Severance” has the dubious distinction of taking one of the longest breaks in TV history between its first and second seasons. At the end of Season 1, the innies revolted against Lumon and found a way to inhabit their outies’ bodies, leading Mark to discover that his wife is not dead at all—and that she has an innie at Lumon. “We ended on a cliffhanger,” Stiller told me. “We didn’t really expect it to be a three-year cliffhanger.” Fans have grown peevishly impatient. In response to an Indiewire article, from October, in which a “Severance” producer said that Erickson already had a vision “mapped out” for a Season 3 (which has yet to be confirmed), one Reddit commenter wrote, “The twist is that the thing they’re doing at Lumon is actually writing the script for the show.”
The wait for Season 2 was due, in part, to external factors, such as the W.G.A. and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023, which shut down the “Severance” set mid-production. But some of the delay appears to have been self-imposed. Erickson, however big-brained, is a first-time screenwriter. Stiller, whom Scott described as the “conjurer” of “Severance,” has long had a reputation in Hollywood as an obsessively exacting auteur. Under the title of executive producer, he is intricately involved in the show’s script development, directs most of the episodes, and oversees editing and postproduction. For the second season, the “Severance” team did rewrites up until the cameras rolled, and then additional rewrites and reshoots during filming—even if, according to an interview Erickson gave to Vanity Fair, it meant scrapping locations that were “built or partially built.” According to Matthew Belloni, who covers Hollywood for the media startup Puck, and has followed the “Severance” delays, the drawn-out process caused the production to run “significantly over budget.” At a reported twenty million dollars or more for each episode, per Bloomberg, it is one of the most expensive series currently in production—no small feat for a show set mostly in an office. (Stiller told me that “any numbers out there are totally inaccurate.”)
Scott said that he approached the role of Mark “like a student asking for more homework,” and in time Stiller anointed him a valued collaborator; he’s credited as an executive producer on Season 2. Stiller told me, “I’ve come to rely on Adam a lot because we share the same taste, and ultimately it all comes down to taste.” Scott would often join Stiller and Erickson in long Zoom sessions spent debating the philosophical and practical realities of the “Severance” world: What happens to innies when they retire? Do they know what America is? (Despite audience fears about red herrings, the men are adamant that there is good reason for Season 1’s roomful of mysterious goats.) To signal Lumon employees’ transformation from outie to innie, Stiller came up with the idea of an eye flutter. Scott worked on the movement for weeks, finally landing on an uncanny approach where his pupils roll into his head while his jaw goes slack.
Scott, who considers Stiller both his boss and a friend, justified the show’s painstaking development process as necessary for quality control. “When something is being rewritten and reworked and re-approached and then torn down and rewritten, I think that’s all part of the path for getting it to be as good as possible,” he said. Erickson sounded more battle-worn. “I don’t think Ben would mind me saying that a part of the reason that it took so long is Ben is a perfectionist,” he told me, and added that he and Stiller sometimes “disagreed on what perfect meant.” He went on to emphasize that any conflict was “always in good faith,” but said, “There are times where we’ll have written seven episodes, and we’ll have a conversation, and Ben or somebody else will say, ‘Well, I think this detail could be better,’ and I’d sort of say, ‘Wait a second, we’d have to go back and rewrite every other episode’—and often we did. As months are ticking by, that was a scary process to have to go through.” (Later, in an e-mail to The New Yorker, Erickson amended his previous statements, writing, “It would be inaccurate to say that production delays had to do with Ben Stiller’s super power of being a perfectionist.” Stiller, for his part, told me that the creative process was not “anything outside of the norm” for a big sci-fi show.)
According to Stiller, Season 2 involved a hundred and eighty-six days of shooting. “Severance” takes place in bleak midwinter, and most of the exterior scenes were shot in the bitter cold in Canada and upstate New York. For the office scenes, the cast spent months at a time inside a windowless set, on a sound stage in the Bronx, wandering through a labyrinth of blinding-white Lumon hallways. Furthering the sense of dislocation, the crew often shifted halls around during the day, so that the actors would sometimes get lost and have to call out for help. Scott told me that he would regularly request ten or more takes per scene—“As many as they’ll give me before we absolutely have to move on.” But many people told me that he was also a leavening presence on set. Britt Lower, who plays Helly, Mark’s co-worker and burgeoning love interest, said that there were strict standards around the tidiness of the innies’ hair styles. (“Flyaway hairs drive me crazy,” Stiller told me.) “Adam and I sort of rebelled against that,” Lower said. “At the very end of every day, we’d get together and mess up our hair.”
After the podcast recording, we walked down Hollywood Boulevard, past the Walk of Fame, to where Scott’s electric Porsche was valeted, and drove to the Chateau Marmont hotel to have dinner with Stiller. As the three of us sat down on the candlelit back patio, Stiller, the son of the late character actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, said, “I’ve been coming to this hotel my whole life. I’m actually staying in the room my parents used to stay in.”
“See, my memory of this place is that I once played a bad guy here in an Aaron Spelling pilot called ‘Crosstown Traffic,’ about hot undercover cops,” Scott said, adding, “It obviously did not get picked up.”
Two of Stiller’s parents’ famous TV projects—“Rhoda,” in which Meara played the titular character’s friend Sally, and “Seinfeld,” in which Jerry Stiller played George’s dad—were filmed at Radford Studio Center, where Scott’s production office is now housed. When I’d visited Scott there, he’d told me that he liked to eat his lunch on the fake New York back lot left over from “Seinfeld.” “Ben used to come here when he was a kid,” he’d said. “And now I’m here. Crazy.” Earlier this year, following in the Stiller vein, Scott announced that he’ll be making his directorial début, with “Double Booked,” an Airbnb-set thriller in which he’ll also star. Kathryn Hahn, who played Scott’s wife in “Step Brothers,” and spent years relegated to sidekick roles before starring in and producing shows including “Mrs. Fletcher” and “Tiny Beautiful Things,” told me that when she and Scott run into each other now they exchange “an unspoken cat-that-ate-the-mouse grin.”
Stiller and Scott both ordered Bibb salads, Diet Cokes, and red meat—a burger for Scott, a steak for Stiller. At some point, conversation turned to one of the first scenes of the “Severance” pilot, in which Mark’s outie sits weeping in his Volvo in the Lumon parking lot. They’d started filming the season in November of 2020, a few months after Scott’s mother died, of A.L.S. To help Scott access his grief, Stiller, who’d recently lost his father, talked Scott through the scene over a walkie-talkie.
Scott recalled, “He said, ‘I want you to split yourself open.’ ” The heaving sobs captured in the sequence were real.
Stiller, who noted that he connected to “Severance,” in part, for its “inherent sadness,” said, “That’s when I knew the show could work.”
Even if the creators’ vision is meticulously mapped out in advance, it’s always a risk when a puzzle-box show gets extended: Can the sense of carefully calibrated suspense be sustained? Will the pieces all fit? So far, “Severance” does not seem liable to become another “Lost,” muddling its way through new plotlines as the mystery expands to fill new seasons. I’ve seen Season 2, and it retains many of the first season’s taut pleasures, partially owing to Scott’s ability to differentiate between Mark’s two states of being even as the innie and outie worlds begin to converge. Scott told me that when he was first conceptualizing the character’s divided consciousness he thought, “The innie is everything I like about myself, and the outie is everything I hate about myself—like, a guy who thinks everything is bullshit and keeps everyone at an arm’s distance.” In the new season, he worked to solidify the micro-physical distinctions that define the two Marks—his innie bright and unfettered in the shoulders, his outie shuffling and affectively sanded down. (As Lizzy Caplan put it to me, Scott has a strange ability to seem like “both the youngest and oldest middle-aged person in the world.”) He hired a vocal coach to master switching between the innie’s obliging tone and the outie’s aggrieved one. Scott’s other workplace underdogs eventually escape their complacency. In “Party Down,” Henry decides that he is going to quit catering and give acting one more shot. In “Parks and Recreation,” Ben ends the show as a congressman and a married father of three. The Mark of Season 2 has snapped out of his semi-lobotomized state. Now a man (or, technically, still two partial men) on a mission to find his wife, he is not idling in neutral; even his desk-jockey side has action scenes. Filming one such sequence, Scott suffered a concussion on set, for a take that made it into the final cut. “A hundred and eighty-six days—it’s a lot,” he told me. “I’m there all the time. And I like being there all the time. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, to be there all the time.” ♦
