Ben Stiller on “Severance”: “It was something unique from the beginning, from the first reading”

Apple TV+ finally found its place in the industry. In the last two or three years he has been shooting new fictions and, until the beginning of 2022, the most successful had been The Morning Show and Ted Lasso. Its impact on the public and the specialized media changed considerably with the arrival of new products and the definitive consecration when it won the Oscar for Best Film with CODA: Signs of the Heart, a film produced by the platform. In this scenario, there is one title that managed to attract attention: Severance.

Created by Dan Erickson, a first-time screenwriter, the series had been written for several years but several doors had been closed to it before it reached the hands of Ben Stiller: “It was original, which I definitely appreciated. I felt that it was a specific tone and worlds that were familiar but different to me. And I felt like I was exploring a great concept, a really simple concept, and I loved that,” the actor confessed to Infobae with a video call through and with some admiration for the final product.

Not so far from humor, this science fiction series has a fairly simple premise: a company divides the memory of its employees. One part is strictly for work and the other for personal life, but neither half knows what happens to the other. The story is based on Mark: his reasons for accepting the job, the opinion of his close ones and the consequences of living two lives in one body. “The first person I thought of was not me but Adam Scott and his unique set of talents that would be perfect for this world. He has this ability to create a kind of tone for his characters that can operate both comically and dramatically and get the essence, but still there are many other things going on inside him,” Stiller slipped over the protagonist.

The story conquered the actor from The Family of My Girlfriend (Meet the Parents), who immediately joined the project. Erickson came with an attractive idea: he was convinced that if it were possible to execute it, companies would soon apply it to their employees and that this is the greatest virtue of the fiction that this Friday reaches its end of the season, with the second already confirmed. On the discovery of the project, Stiller added: “Dan Erickson's writing had such a specific voice that it made me laugh and it also troubled me. Within the program there were a lot of possibilities to have a mix of different feelings, in addition to the atmosphere that seemed like it could sometimes be really disturbing and also a lot of fun.”

— Why didn't you want to act in this production?

“Simply because I haven't been doing that, acting and directing, for a while now. I liked not doing both at the same time and enjoyed doing only one thing each time. And I loved the idea of what this show could be in terms of its concept. I've been lucky enough to do what I love for most of my life. Every time I did a job I didn't love, it was really bad. Then I quit or they fired me. Here I preferred only to produce and direct.

— What were the inspirations for the appearance of the series and the directing style of the show?

“There were many different influences, which were simply in reading; images and ideas almost unconscious, or unconscious, I suppose, of everything I have seen and read. Photography too; all the things you bring with you every time you enter a project. Then we sat down with our production designer, Jeremy Hindle, and Jessica Lee Gagne, director of photography, and we watched some movies and photographs and talked about these ideas, about why this place is the way it is. I think the most important thing was to find our Lumen location [the company that performs these operations to its employees], find the building. When we found that building, which was the first location we saw, I found it very adequate in terms of the aesthetics of the show. We took details of the design of that building to build the scenarios that would comprise the lower floors of Lumen.

The fiction brought together a short cast of outstanding stars: Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Dichen Lachman, Jen Tullock, Tramell Tillman, Michael Chernus and Christopher Walken. But the central focus is on the four characters who work with Mark (Scott), which for Stiller meant one of the central challenges of the series: “We have four actors sitting around this cubicle most of the time, in a large room that was written as a room with a cubicle where everyone sits together, which it's strange. And we thought we just had to find a style for this place that, hopefully, would not compete with what the actors would do and would give us interesting angles and ways to film it in nine episodes. So that was the fun and the challenge, and it evolved as we went along.”

Before the long-awaited season finale, Apple TV+ announced the renewal of Severance for more episodes. This original labor thriller has become one of the favorite series of specialized critics in recent weeks and it is now confirmed that it will not end with the last episode of the initial season.

Severance is an Apple TV+ series that premieres its season finale on Friday, April 8.

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