Apple TV+ Surprises Severance Fans With Season 2 Activation and Panel At Bell Works

Pop Culture Planet was invited inside Lumon Industries for a surprise fan event celebrating the second season of Apple TV+’s hit series Severance. Fans were welcomed into the event by Ms. Huang, played by Sarah Bock, which took place at Bell Works in Holmdel, New Jersey where the show is filmed. There was a live piano performance of the Severance theme song by composer Theodore Shapiro, followed by an exhibit led by Gwendoline Christie in character as Lorne showcasing the Mammalians Nurturable Department.

After the performance, Stephen Colbert came out to moderate a conversation with the Severance cast and executive producers. “As Mr. Milchick might say, ‘Come, let us reason together, and ideate the manifestation of Kier's ultimate intent,” said Colbert, bringing out the cast. “Please remember to pay close attention to the order in which they are introduced, where they sit, what they are wearing, and what words they do not use to answer these questions as any or all of these could be clues to the events of season 3. Just as importantly, if Ben denies that anything tonight is a clue, that itself is a clue.”

It’s no secret that fans are addicted to Severance, from its incredible cast to the mysteries and clues dropped each week — and Ben Stiller confirms everything means something. “The chair is usually never just there, you know what I mean,” said Stiller about show theories. “There definitely are so many ideas that people have that are amazing. A lot of times it's something that people are picking up on that we didn't do intentionally, but then it's like, oh, but it kind of makes sense, which is interesting. […] It's amazing that the fans are so invested and so smart and are giving back so much to the show. [They] are so creatively invested in the show that I feel like they care about the show as much as we care about the show. I've never had that experience, which is pretty amazing.”

The rise in popularity of the show has meant the rise in security measures. “Once season one was released, suddenly we had to like encode our emails and have code words for the show. We started calling it something else, which was super weird,” shared Adam Scott, with Stiller adding: “Season 2 we called ‘Cold Harbor.’”

“It is endlessly surprising to film because the scripts are exceptional. Whilst everything is very much thought about and controlled and placed, you still have the space to be creative and to be collaborative. It's a very fulfilling creative experience, which doesn't regularly happen in television,” shared Christie, while John Turturro continued: “Sometimes you can have more freedom when the material is so precise because then you can do it many different ways. It's a fallacy that when you're improvising you're always freer. That's not necessarily true.”

Being a part of a show like Severance is a pinch me moment for actors. “This is so rare and special. I'm not going to get used to it. I know how privileged this is,” said Bock who joined the cast for season 2. “It was incredible ‘cause I'm a big fan of the first season and all of these people up here. Getting to work with them and meet them was a dream come true. I was pinching myself every single day.”

The idea behind Severance came as showrunner and creator Dan Erickson found himself walking into an office job that he hated. “[I] caught myself being like, ‘God, I wish there was some way to just disassociate from the next 8 hours.’ It was a real thought. It wasn’t me trying to come up with a TV show,” shared Erickson. “We made it during the pandemic. We had no idea what environment we were going to be bringing the show into, but it happened to come at a time when people were coming back from work from home. This idea of a work-life balance was very front of mind because that barrier had been worn down by this whole work from home Zoom thing. It's fascinating. You see how it works in this context that we could never have predicted. There was a strike during our second season. A lot of people talking about work and what workers should be owed and where the boundaries should be, where they're not going to give too much of themselves. Those things just can't help but make their way into the story.”

“It's an intriguing concept that somehow hit on something with people that we all relate to. The opening line of the show is: who are you? Our sense of identity, what makes up who we are really. There's a lot of bifurcation in our world. Our country is divided. We divide our work life and our home life. All those things are part of it,” said Stiller. “Dan hit on a greater metaphor of: what is life about? It's like what these people are doing at work. They don't know what they're doing, why they're there, or who they are, which is what I feel all of us in life in the world are trying to figure out.”

Much of the intrigue in Severance also ties back to the characters, especially their journeys as innies and outies. “So many of the fans of the show care so much about the characters. They relate so much to these characters. They care about them as fully realized human beings,” said Stiller. “That connection with the actors and the characters and their investment in their journey and what they're going through is I think what people ultimately hold on to when you watch a show.”

In season 2, Zach Cherry’s character Dylan kisses his wife as both an innie and an outie, which begs the question: could this be validation that the relationship is so special even your innie knows this is the right person for you? “It's tricky. I don't know if it's cheating. They're breaking new cheating ground it is,” said Cherry. “What I loved about the arc was watching the innie and the outie start at odds with each other about this and then, over the course of the season, they learn something from each other and see what they can provide for each other. It does feel almost like a wake up moment for the outie to realize what had been going on in his relationship that he was asleep to.”

That core connection between innie and outie for Dylan takes on a different form in Helly R. “This is one person and two sides of that same person. I think of it as the inner critic and the inner child. Helly is this inner child that wakes up, pure consciousness, and has this defiant spirit of rebellion just embedded within her,” explained Britt Lower. “It made a lot of sense to me that Dan wrote her on the outside to have grown up in this high control company where that rebel has been really suppressed very deeply. When she's awakened at the beginning of season one, she's on fire. She has a really clear mission and a really strong sense of what is ethical and what is not.”

Dichen Lachman called season 2 “a huge challenge.” “I was terrified. I didn't want to let anybody down,” she said. “Ms. Casey is very close to my heart. I love her. She was the first character that I really got to inhabit on the show. There's this innocence and curiosity and this want and desire to feel included on the seventh floor with all these incredible people. I just feel for her so much. And then Gemma was built by all the incredible performances around her leading up to learning about her presence. With Mark's grief of her and Devon and Rickens' loss of this person. To have all of these little fragments building up to episode 7, it was just a gift, with incredible leadership, to get to do that.”

This season finds Mark’s innie and outie having a conversation that culminates in high stakes revelations in the finale. “It was always a scene that I knew we wanted to have on the show. We weren't sure where that was going to be and it was something we figured out in the writer's room,” said Erickson. “They've come to such a point of mutual distrust by this point. Each of them has a reason to suspect the other's motives so I just thought it would be so fascinating to actually put them face to face. But with something like that on the page, you've never seen anything quite like that, so you don't know if it's going to work until you put it in the hands of these guys.”

Scott had the hard job of memorizing over 12 pages of lines, including rewrites, and then recording messages back and forth to himself to respond to. “It was a scene that was going to happen so for the entire season it was on the horizon. It was something I was dreading. It was like, there’s nothing I can do. It’s coming. I’m gonna have to do it. It’s something you could so easily screw up and I was afraid of screwing it up honestly,” said Scott. “I was afraid of not buying it. It's just actor things where you're afraid of the most challenging thing and I felt that was going to be incredibly challenging and it was, […] but it was also really fun.”

The finale also delivers a Mr. Milchick-led marching band celebration at the completion of Cold Harbor. While they weren’t specifically looking for a musical number this season, someone brought up marching bands in the writer’s room and it clicked. “There's something about the enthusiasm and the pomp of it, but mixed with the fact that it's people moving in unison on a grid. There's always been something a little eerie about it to me so it just somehow felt perfect, it felt right,” said Erickson, with Stiller adding: “I feel like the marching band in MDR was such a weird thing. To have like a hundred people in there, I remember it scared us a little bit.”

It’s easy when you’ve got a player who is game like Tramell Tillman is. “Tramell’s got it going on, so why not take advantage of that? I knew it was going to be unique and interesting and there's so many things going on with Milchick at that moment in terms of where he is,” said Stiller. “His relationship with his bosses and the company, the stress he's under, and then having to pull this thing off. There's so many layers to what's going on with his character that he infused. That was what was fun about it too.”

Meanwhile, Tillman calls Milchick “a showman” when it came to bringing that sequence to life. “[There’s this] contrast between the Kier hymn, which was very military, and then The Ballad of Ambrose & Gunnel, which was more reminiscent of HBCU bands, which is what I appreciate because we're infusing that history into the show. We get to see how Milchick is a showman and he shows off.”

It also begs the question as to where Milchick stands at Lumon. He’s got a new position, but there are many hidden details in his office that could tie back to him being a double agent. “No, I think he's still very much devoted,” said Tillman, while commenting on getting to help add those elements to the show. “What I loved about those particular details is that I was given license to contribute to that. Ben and Dan and Jeremy Hindle, we had a lot of conversations about how do we tell this story of Milchick in this new position that he's in and what would be in his office. There was a lot of conversation and I thought an iceberg would be a nice touch and the duck rabbit. A lot of the mystery that's still there.”

While the cast shouted out Burt and Irv moments and the marching band sequence as their favorites of season 2, Britt Lower even revealed who was truly behind the Kier Eagan animatronic — at least behind-the-scenes. “Ben Stiller operated the Kier Eagan robot,” she shared, with Stiller adding: “I just did the movements, but Mark Geller the actor who is Kier Eegan was doing the voice live.”

Following the panel, fans were transported through the halls of Lumon, past the iconic Kier wall and break room posters to keep the party going. Alongside food, drink, and Mark balloons, there were Macrodata Refinement team cubicles on display, guests could record video messages to their innies, or wait in line get their photos taken for their own Lumon badges.

The first two seasons of Severance are streaming on Apple TV+, with a third season already confirmed.