'Intimate' fan art, pop star superfans and viral slang: How ‘Severance’ stars are handling the show’s massive success
The stars of the Apple TV+ series have been pleasantly surprised by the show's massive success and intense fandom.
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Severance premiered nearly three years ago. After a long wait, the Apple TV+ series is finally back with Season 2 — and it’s a bigger phenomenon than its producers and stars ever dreamed.
The show follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), who leads a team at the mysterious Lumon Industries, where some employees have undergone a “severance” procedure that divides their memories between their work and personal lives. Their “innies” and “outies” have entirely different, disconnected experiences with the world, leading to confusion and distress for the innies.
When Scott first heard slang and terminology from the show being used in pop culture, he realized the show had made it big. That, and when Janelle Monáe posted about it on X.
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“I just couldn’t believe it. These are things that we’d been bandying about for a few years at that point, and all of a sudden, people knew what it meant and cared enough to reference it and use it,” Scott told Yahoo Entertainment. “It kind of blew my mind.”
Adam Scott, Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Britt Lower in Severance Season 1. (Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection)
From there, they had to start “working in code,” he said, with “top-secret emails and scripts.”
“We made it in a bubble. No one cared at all what we were doing. Suddenly, people were into it,” Scott added.
Ben Stiller, who is the show’s director and executive producer, told Yahoo Entertainment he knew it was a hit when SZA posted about it. He later tagged her directly when the new Severance trailer dropped, which seems to have been a hint that the two are on friendly terms. Stiller starred in the music video for SZA's new song “Drive” in December.
Britt Lower plays a new “innie” named Helly with a mysterious past, which is revealed at the end of Season 1. She knew the show was something special when people started dressing like her for Halloween. For Zach Cherry, who plays the Lumon employee Dylan, his moment of realization came when he saw an influx of fan art for his character online.
“It's one thing to watch a show, and it's a whole other thing to be so engaged that you want to create your own art in conversation with it,” Cherry told Yahoo Entertainment.
John Turturro, whose character, Irving, had a romantic arc with a co-worker played by Christopher Walken, told Yahoo Entertainment that he usually stays offline, but that people started sending him posts from X and Reddit about the two actors’ fictional love affair.
“It was getting really intimate and I was like, ‘This is a little much for me,’” he joked. “People said: … ‘Now I see a whole other side of John!’ But obviously, it’s resonating. There are a lot of young people who are really involved in it.”
It’s not Turturro’s first role to have inspired a ton of fan engagement. He warned his co-stars Lower and Cherry that things can go “pretty far.”
“People [who are fans of] The Big Lebowski have tattoos all over their body of me in very intimate places, and sometimes they try to show me. And I’m like, ‘I cannot believe my face is next to your whatever-it-is,’” he said. “It’s gone on for like 20 years. People have their own fantasy life … they’re ‘severed.’”
“It is very embarrassing to see you’re on someone’s buttocks and inner thigh,” he added with a laugh.
Patricia Arquette in Season 1 of Severance. (Apple TV+/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Patricia Arquette, who plays the now-disgraced Lumon boss, Harmony Cobel, told Yahoo Entertainment that she always knew the show was something special, thanks to its “originality.” She credited its creator and writer, Dan Erickson, for investing so much time and creativity in the project.
Severance was Erickson’s first major Hollywood endeavor. After coming up with the idea for the show in 2012, he started writing it while he was working at a door factory — a location jokingly mentioned in the show. In 2016, emailed the script directly to Stiller’s production company. In 2022, the show finally premiered. It’s been a long process, but Erickson has been pouring that time and energy into making something unique.
Arquette said that she noticed how thoughtful and detailed his work was when she was filming a scene in the show’s first season and started flipping through a prop book, which was remarkably thorough. It turned out to be a real book that Erickson had written just for the show.
“He’s gone so deep into so many aspects of the corporation and the world. It’s astounding,” she said.
Erickson enjoys the widespread discussion about the show, but he told Yahoo Entertainment that he aims to stay focused on the “big, long-term plans” he outlined with Stiller before they pitched the show to Apple. He hinted that they may have changed a bit, given the long wait between seasons.
Fans will just have to tune in to see what happens.
The first episode of Season 2 of Severance starts streaming Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.
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