For 'Severance' Star Adam Scott, Work & Life Can't Be Separated
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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The hit drama series Severance, a sci-fi take on work-life balance, is now into its second season on Apple TV+, after a long hiatus. Today, we feature our interview with Adam Scott, who stars in it. You may know him previously from his role in Parks and Recreation, playing Ben Wyatt, government worker and love interest for Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler. He also was in the series Big Little Lies and in the cult favorite Party Down. In Severance, as Mark S., he's a guy still grieving for his wife who died in a car accident years ago. Unable to return to work as a professor because of his grief, he decides to work for the company Lumen, a mysterious conglomerate that performs a controversial surgery on some of its employees. Workers can choose to get a chip implanted in their brain that makes them forget about their personal lives when they're at work and their work lives when they're at home.
In the current season, there's some evidence that Mark's wife may not be dead after all, which only reinforces his desire to quit the company that severed his consciousness. But his sister Devin, played by Jen Tulloch, urges him to stay put and investigate further.
Devin, what are you doing? You remember I identified her, right?
Yes, Mark.
I saw her body. Yeah, I know.
My thing is, if we could just get like a half step more confirmation, then it's not gonna be something that continues to haunt us, you know what I mean? Us? Yes. She was my family too, Mark.
Yeah, but she was my wife.
I know, but you're not the only one her death affected.
Oh really, it affected you?
Yes.
Did you have to tell her parents that she was dead?
How about her students? How about this? Did your sheets smell like her four weeks afterwards?
Ben Stiller co-created Severance and directs a lot of the episodes. The series also stars Patricia Arquette, John Turturro and Christopher Walken. We're going to listen to the interview from 2022 that Fresh Air's Anne-Marie Baldonado did with Adam Scott.
Adam Scott, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you, Anne-Marie.
It's obvious that office work culture has changed. Pre-pandemic, there was this fear that because of technology, people would be working all the time, leaving little time for outside life. And with the pandemic, those lines between the two have gone kind of beyond blurred. And people are really reconsidering what work means, how much time one should work, how much of their lives should be devoted to it. You know, this show goes dramatic in the other way, like separating the two. And because it's so much about office culture, is that something that appealed to you and, you know, everyone who works on the show, like thinking through those issues?
Yeah. You know, while we were making Severance, we shot it in New York. My family is in Los Angeles. So, you know, it was right in the heart of pre-vaccine pandemic. So it was tough. I didn't get to see them very much, but it was sort of the Wild West as far as. just trying to make this show and keep everyone from getting sick. And so everybody was really sealed off and isolated. I would shoot the show, get in a van, drive for 40 minutes to this apartment I was staying in, sit there by myself and eat, sleep, get up, get back in a van, go there, shoot this crazy show where there's all this isolation and it's sort of about this separation from work and life. And so it all started from... forming into this one thing in my head and in my memories of it.
The production design of the show, the look of the show really leads to this feeling of strangeness, creepiness, also isolation. For example, your character Mark lives in this sterile corporate apartment in this snowy landscape, and that's his outside life. And the offices are very stark. They're empty, but symmetrical. It's all fluorescent lights. And there are so many hallways.
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