Severance Season 2 may have taken nearly three years to arrive, but creator Dan Erickson and director/EP Ben Stiller’s pursuit of quality was well worth the wait.
The premiere’s opening scene swiftly catapults us back into the high-stakes environment of Lumon’s Severed Floor by showing Mark (Adam Scott) sprinting through the blinding white halls in search of his Outie’s wife, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). And if the visual masterpiece that is Mark’s twisty 1:22 hallway marathon blew your mind, give the Severance team a round of applause, because that scene alone took a whopping five months to film.
On the January 17 episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott, the star and director/EP recapped Season 2, Episode 1 (“Hello, Ms. Cobel”), chatted with Mr. Milchick actor Tramell Tillman, and gave behind the scenes insight into standout scenes like that ambitious opening feat.
“Mark has just seen this picture of Ms. Casey, and he realizes that she’s alive and she’s his outie’s wife. Then all of a sudden he’s back in the elevator, right?” Stiller told Scott. “And I asked you, what would you do?”
“My first knee-jerk reaction was, I would just start running and trying to find her. I would just run towards the Wellness Center,” Scott replied. So that’s what Mark does!
Stiller was admittedly psyched to do another long hallway scene, because he felt it was “a nice mirror” to the Severed Floor intro scene in Season 1. “I thought, OK, let’s tell everybody this is gonna be = a little bit more jacked up, a little more energy — the stakes are a little bit higher, and let’s do this in a way that we haven’t seen before, hopefully,” Stiller said.
Scott shared that it was “incredible” to watch the sequence grow over time and transform into the seamless, stunning scene that appears in the final cut. “You were really kind of building it in your mind, and with your team, over a period of time,” he told Stiller. “And it just kept growing and getting more detailed and intricate and really told its own little story here.”
Stiller noted that the scene was “a great collaboration” and shouted out “Jessica Lee Gangé, our cinematographer; Jeremy Hendel, our production designer; our gaffer, our grip, all of the people on the camera team, and our visual effects people” who were tasked with figuring out how to create a variety of shots that could feel like one in the end.
“I think there are about 10 different pieces in it, and we shot those 10 different pieces over a period of — what would you say, five months?” Scott asked. Stiller confirmed, noting that the delay was the result of scheduling conflicts and a variety of factors, including the frequent demand for the hallway in other scenes.
“…Each [piece] had a different need in terms of what had to be done with the set. There was one where we had to do it completely with green screen and have you on a treadmill, and have a motion control camera come around in front of you and do all this stuff,” Stiller explained. “And then there was one — we had pulled one of the walls out and we’re using this machine called a bolt arm. It’s a motion control robot arm that the camera is on, that you can program, and it moves. That thing takes up a lot of space. So our normal layout of all the hallways had to get torn up. And when you’re doing that, you can’t shoot other scenes in the hallways. So we had to schedule it at times when you guys would be shooting a scene in a different set…”
To help set the mood and establish the proper urgency and mystery within the scene, it’s set to Les McCann’s “Burnin’ Coal” and Theodore Shapiro’s iconic Severance score.
Scott also admitted that now, years after the scene was filmed, people are asking if he trained to do the running in the sequence. Though he claims he didn’t do anything specific to get in Hallways Sprinting Shape, he did cite Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible as his running inspo. Classic.
Be sure to read Decider’s Severance Season 2 premiere recap for more Episode 1 insights, and check out The Severance Podcast while you wait for Episode 2.
New episodes of Severance Season 2 premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.
