‘Holy sh-t, this is like 'Star Wars'‘: The ultimate oral history of ‘Severance' Season 2

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21 hours ago

Three years ago, Ben Stiller and Adam Scott barnstormed Hollywood with their new Apple TV+ series about a near-future, retro-tinged dystopia where people could separate their work selves from their personal lives. The brainchild of disenchanted former cubicle warrior Dan Erickson, the show was called Severance, after the process used to split consciousnesses.
'Dan wrote this pilot script about 10 years ago that had such a relatable concept: to contemplate the idea of cutting off one part of your life. It came out of the fact that he worked at a job that he really disliked in a door factory,' Stiller recounted. 'He was thinking about how could he skip past his eight or 10 hours a day of being there. That concept really resonates with people [struggling] to spend their lives doing things to make a living and [facing] parts of your life that you just don't want to deal with.'
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Both Stiller and Scott also felt a connection to the conceit of Severance. 'It's tricky being in entertainment because it's always with you,' Scott said ahead of Season 1. 'You're always thinking about it. And if you're an actor and somewhat recognizable, you're always being reminded of who you are and what you do. Sometimes wanting to shut one part down and be able to focus on the other is something everyone can relate to.'
Apple
'The other part is that it really resonated in terms of the workplace comedy,' Stiller explained. 'It felt like The Office or Parks and Rec but had this weird sort of Twilight Zone element to it. What if you worked in an office where there's just this day-to-day office banter? You didn't know who you were, what you were doing, or why you were doing it, which is kind of like life.'
The notion of separating lives, combined with a slow-burn mystery interspersed with moments of absurdist humor, made Severance an instant water-cooler show for the COVID age, and propelled it to 14 Emmy nominations, including Best Drama Series, and two wins (for music composition and main title design).
But defying any notion of a sophomore slump, its second season — which arrived in January after a grueling delay due to industry strikes — Severance became a full-blown phenomenon, seducing audiences and critics alike, breaking ratings records for Apple TV+, and likely securing even more Emmy glory.
In an exclusive roundtable with Gold Derby (watch above) and subsequent interviews, the Severance team went deep inside the creation of Season 2, exploring the memorable scenes, the enduring mysteries, and the joy of goats.
Dan Erickson (creator) Ben Stiller (executive producer, lead director) Adam Scott (Mark S./Mark Scout) Particia Arquette (Harmony Cobel) Britt Lower (Helly R./Helena Eagen) Zach Cherry (Dylan G./Dylan George) Tramell Tillman (Seth Milchick) Dichen Lachman (Ms. Casey, et al./Gemma Scout) John Turturro (Irving B./Irving Bailiff) Merritt Wever (Gretchen George) Gwendoline Christie (Lorne) Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Mr. Drummond) Jen Tullock (Devon Scout-Hale) Jessica Lee Gagné (cinematographer/director of Episode 7) Sarah Edwards (costume designer) Theodore Shapiro (composer) Eric Leven (VFX supervisor)
Ben Stiller/Apple
Ben Stiller (executive producer, lead director): Mark has just seen the picture and he realizes that [Gemma] is alive. And then suddenly he's back at Lumon in the elevator. We wanted to get the season started off with a bang, and I asked Adam what he would do, and Adam said, 'I'd run.'
Eric Leven (VFX supervisor): Ben likes to shoot practically, but for the opening setup, the opening run, there was just no way to do that. So we started combining a bunch of different techniques. One of those techniques was this big giant robot motion-controlled camera. We [also] put him on a treadmill and build a CG environment around him. And he was running through real hallways for part of this show. We basically shuffled the deck to make new techniques to hide the stitches [to make the run appear to be a single shot] and keep the audience guessing.
Dan Erickson (creator): The spine of the story pretty much stayed the same from how we'd conceived it when we were working on Season 1, which is that we knew that we wanted to get Gemma out [of Lumon] by the end of it. We wanted this mystery of why she was there to be at least somewhat — not solved — but brought to this next phase. And so I always knew that it was going to end with that moment with Mark getting her to the door. But it was while we were writing it that we came up with this arc for Innie Mark that, by that point, he would have learned to prioritize his own existence on the same level as the outies. And so while the season starts with him running to find Gemma, we realized that it was going to end with him heartbreakingly turning his back on her.
Ben Stiller/Apple
Ben Stiller: There was discussion along the way about where we would end that scene. … I remember we talked about possibly ending the scene before he made the choice between the two of them. But we thought that was a really interesting trajectory, that he would start this season in search for her and then turn her away at the end. Hopefully Innie Mark earned [that choice] in terms of the audience's point of view. Hopefully the audience would empathize with Outie Mark's point of view, too. But we really didn't want to do another cliffhanger-type ending like Season 1. We really wanted the Season 2 finale to be different.
Erickson: We ended Season 1 with everybody angry at us. And so we thought, 'Let's end this one with only half of the people angry at us.'
Stiller: If only half of the audience was mad at us, we'd be doing our job.
Erickson: I've been polling people on the street, and it's about 50-50.
Britt Lower (Helly R./Helena Eagen): For me, I use a lot of analogies. They sound like different music in my head. I use music a lot when I'm getting ready in the morning. I'm also informed by how my costars are behaving with me, how the scene is written, how it's directed. There's a lot of inspiration once you get to set by the elements around you that are shifted slightly based on where you're at. Obviously when I'm Helena posing as Helly, Helena had a similar job to myself as an actor, which was to blend into this family that she is encountering for the first time. And she's having to do the same kind of role as we do as actors, which is to assume an identity and to move around like that person. And I think it was something we worked really closely [on] with Ben. We were trying to figure out what things slip through. When is her acting not so good? And when is she able to tap into that part of her, that inner-rebel that she's maybe abandoned from childhood or has maybe never had full access to. Especially in [Episode] 204 ['Woe's Hollow'], she gets a kick out of playing against Milchick [Tramell Tillman] and getting to be the one in the classroom who's disrupting. Well, not the classroom, but the campfire.
Zach Cherry (Dylan G./Dylan George): I think what [Britt was] saying about mirroring our roles as actors is true for me in terms of thinking about the distinctions between the innie and the outtie. Because anytime you're playing a character, there [are] pieces of you that are in there, but there are pieces of the character that aren't necessarily in you. That is a little bit how I thought about the distinction between the two. They are very much the same guy, but there are pieces that don't cross over. And for me, the innie is a version of the guy who doesn't have any of the external baggage that the outie is carrying around. So that was my initial way into it. And then also I just did all the same stuff Britt did.
John Turturro (Irving B./Irving Bailiff): When I was figuring out how to play two different versions of Irving, I thought to myself, "Well, what bleeds through?" Because you're not a different person. You still have a vocabulary. You're still an adult. You don't speak like you're 6 years old. That's a conceit that you have to then fill in. So what does bleed through and what doesn't bleed through? And then I realized that if a person who's very disciplined or very regimented knows how to follow rules, that would bleed through.
Cherry: It's been mentioned [that Dan Erikson came up with the idea for Severance while working at a door factory]. I think it was sort of a fun way for him to sneak that in there and put make it kind of surreal, because that place we shot at almost felt like the Monsters, Inc. set. There were just doors flying around. I imagine that's not what his real experience was like I have not asked him. But it was fun to get to bring a piece of Dan's Severance inspiration into the show.
Merritt Wever (Gretchen George): The first scene I shot was our first scene in the visitation room, which is incredibly disorienting. Because we shot the innie scenes episode to episode first, I had a visceral as opposed to an intellectual understanding of what it was that I was missing from him.
Cherry: I remember there were a few different versions of his backstory that I heard thrown out there that may have changed before we got into the season or whatever. So the specifics of it didn't matter to me a ton as much as just sort of where the relationship is at emotionally now.
Wever: I enjoyed the scenes with innie Dylan so much that I kind of missed them. I think I preferred them to the outie Dylan scenes. The character is getting to experience these feelings she hasn't felt for so long, and she's getting to feel what it's like for her husband to look at her a certain way and treat her a certain way and talk to her a certain way and be interested and maybe even love her again in the way that he used to. And so what I'm experiencing as a character and as an actor is a lot lighter and more pleasant and almost that kind of feeling of having a first crush. And so then when you go and shoot the outie scenes, it's just so, it's dimmer, it's dimmer, it's bleaker.
Cherry: One interesting thing about this season that I really enjoyed that was sort of highlighted by our characters arcs was how Dylan's innie and outie find this common ground over the course of the season. They are two sides of this guy who the innie doesn't have any of this baggage, but also kind of wants more out of his life. And the outie is a guy who has all this wonderful stuff in his life, but has all these things going on that have maybe got him down on himself. And so it was fun seeing them come together and kind of learn from each other.
Wever: I'm not privy to any of the other people on the show. I am not in the office. There was this sense of, not isolation because that sounds negative, but separateness, which I think kind of fit the storyline. She really doesn't understand what's going on and what's happening to her husband down there. She really is almost a tourist in this experience. And sometimes that's what it's like to be a guest actor on a show that's already a moving train.
Cherry: When Season 1 ended, this storyline was not on my radar at all. We had not discussed this storyline, and then when we came back in for Season 2, they were like, "OK, here's what we think we're going to do. So I'm sort of just excited to see whatever that thing that I can't even imagine now that they will tell me about once we start Season 3. I'm just looking forward to that."
Erickson: I was terrified [of this episode] because it's an expansion of the idea. It's a new iteration of the concept of the show. And I was like, 'Can the show sustain this? I love the idea in my head, but you always wonder, is it going to play? Is it going to come across? Of course Jessica Lee Gagné, who directed that episode, is one of the most brilliant people on the planet. Even with all of us knowing how good she was, she managed to surpass those expectations.
Jessica Lee Gagné (the show's cinematographer making her directing debut): I definitely had a lot of doubts going into it. But then it seemed so obvious that this episode was meant for me to direct. … I really lost myself within my work for a long time. So going into my 30s, I went through a big questioning phase of, 'OK, I need to find my partner, freeze my eggs, do all of these things … or did I miss out on that part of life?' So I was like, 'Well, if anyone's going to do this, I have to do it.'
Dichen Lachman (Ms. Casey, et al./Gemma Scout): When I found out she was directing that episode, I was very excited. I think she's an extraordinary talent, and I love her vision. I love her creativity, and I love how flexible she is in terms of doing whatever she has to do to capture the moment. And I thought it was really nice to have a female director for that episode.
Erickson: What I knew we had was this amazing secret weapon in Dichen. Not that she was a secret, but I knew that she was going to be able to play each of these versions of the character so strangely and tenderly and differently, and she just knocked it out of the park. She nailed it.
Lachman: When I first started on Season 1 — maybe people will laugh at me — I listened to [German self-help author] Eckhart Tolle, and I loved Jung's idea of the shadow self and the subconscious. They were all parts of Gemma's subconscious, or pain body. I don't believe, just from my point of view, that the innies are like completely new, fabricated people, as soon as they walk through the door. I think it's just opening up different parts of your subconscious self, or something you've buried, maybe something that happened when you're a child, and different aspects of her are coming out in these innies, right? In a normal life, it would be wonderful if we could reintegrate ourselves so we can be one whole person and acknowledge all those parts of ourselves. It's like a spiritual journey, but in terms of the world of Lumon, that was how I chose to approach the innies.
Sarah Edwards (costume designer): She had different hair and makeup for each room. She had so many changes in that episode. It was more changes than she'd had in the entire series for that one episode. We started with putting her in something neutral, that green costume, which she could both live in her room, they keep her, and she could do her exercises. She could almost sleep in it. It's like a prison uniform, sadly, of some sort. And then from there, she has a little closet in her room. And for each of the rooms she goes to, she changes into a different costume, but she doesn't remember anything from the rooms she goes to. So she never is quite sure why she's wearing what she's wearing. And then when she gets into the rooms, she's stressed appropriately for the test they're doing on her in those rooms. So we had the Christmas room and we made that Christmas bathrobe. Everything is weirdly retro, but it isn't a specific period. And that is always the challenge with Severance. It isn't '50s, it isn't '60, it isn't '70s, but it has a feeling of all of those periods.
Ben Stiller/Apple
Lachman: For me to keep track, I used the costume, the set pieces, the circumstances around it, to inform how her body would feel in a situation like that. I purposefully carried tension in different places in my body, so that it was quite fragmented. …The dentist one for me was terrifying. She says that line, 'But I was just here.' It's just so sad that her whole life has just been in this room with this strange man. It's heartbreaking.
Gagné: Dichen's openness to exploration on set and trying different things made it a lot easier for me, working with actors like this for the first time. She wasn't afraid of doing anything or trying anything. There were some moments that we were just exploring and trying stuff. We had lots of conversations, personal conversations, to see what we could touch on. This very female way of hiding parts of ourselves and not fully showing what we feel in order to put other people first, was always a thing we'd come back to. We had many conversations and we moved through it together.
Stiller: I thought it was really important that that episode had a female point of view. Jessica is just so talented and really is interested thematically in a lot of the ideas that are in that episode, in terms of how we connect with each other, and how people who have some sort of spiritual connection are linked in different ways. What she did with it visually was just so impressive. It's great to watch her do her thing.
Gagné: I would be shooting Episode 10 [the finale] and then prepping Episode 7 at the same time. It was like I had two or three full-time jobs. I lived and breathed Severance for sure. To get to direct for the first time on Severance was a pretty luxurious first-time directing experience, and I felt like I needed to live up to it. So I gave it everything I had.
Adam Scott (Mark S./Mark Scout): It was something that had been talked about all season and that I was honestly dreading because it sounded hard, and it sounded like something that I could screw up any number of ways. Shooting it was something I was freaked out about. We started really workshopping and going through it and massaging it pretty early on. Dan and the writers were changing it as we went. When we got on the set, we started really going through it with a fine-tooth comb and trying to figure out exactly what the conversation should be. We had to start shooting it on a Monday morning and we were changing it right up until, what, Friday night? And then we had to stop because I had to memorize it at some point.
Stiller: It felt like every time we rehearsed, we would find something else, or a different question would come up.
Erickson: That's right. In some of the shots you can actually hear me typing rewrites.
Scott: Because we knew where the conversation needed to end up. But also these guys needed to talk to each other. I mean, they were on this collision course all season. So it had to happen. Their interests at the beginning of the season were aligned. At a certain point they start to diverge and then they get on this collision course. So they have to communicate. But there's also sort of a novelty to it for both of them. And we had to find that, but without going to a place like, what kind of shampoo do we use? We needed to avoid silliness, but we also needed to get that feeling of, this is crazy and weird. It was a really tricky thing for these guys to write and to figure out. And they did an incredible job.
Apple
Stiller: Filming it was challenging for Adam because he had to just do a whole scene with himself. He had the videos that he had recorded for either character to respond to, but there was so much coverage and just keeping it all straight [was difficult]. I'm just amazed how he did it because I was having trouble keeping it straight in my head.
Scott: I have to say, by far the most difficult scene partner I've ever worked with.
Gwendoline Christie (Lorne): I watched Season 1 of Severance, I thought it was one of the freshest shows I'd seen. It was endlessly surprising and unpredictable. I love the corridors. I love the environment, this idea of bureaucracy in the corporate world, the fight to understand and to get out of it, the desire to transcend circumstances, and I loved its very powerful aesthetic sense. I thought it was exceptional, and I felt depressed that I wasn't in it. And more than that, I felt angry that I wasn't in this show. I really badly wanted to be in the show, and I felt absolutely certain that I would never be asked to be in the show. And one morning, I woke up to an email from Ben Stiller asking me if I'd like to be a part of the show, and they would write a character [for me]. I was happy to do anything, but I really wanted to do something involving the goats. I couldn't believe it when I had the Zoom with Ben, and he said, 'Well, you're in charge of the goats.' I was over the moon about it.
Apple
Edwards: I loved working with Gwendoline. She is just a genius, and she jumped right into it. She was totally open. She had spent a month in the country with goats and sheep before she came to her fitting. We started with period research, maybe a jumper or something from the '70s. And then we speak it into this world, which really has no period. It's like doing a period movie with no period. We looked at some '70s silhouettes for work clothes, and then we modernized them. We added a leather work apron, like a blacksmith's apron. We tested all the different color greens to see which ones would work best in the space, with the white walls, the green rolling hills, the goats. We did a lot of camera tests. And then from there, Gwendoline just took it and made it her own.
Stiller: It's funny because in the first season, I remember we had a discussion, like, 'Are we doing too much with the goats? Are there too many goats?' And it was like, 'No. No. No.' The goat room was fun because we went to a golf course in Brooklyn and built the walls around the golf course together with the hills. The goats are part of the show. And the goats are great to work with. No goats are ever harmed making the show, and they're real. They're not CG goats.
Christie: It's something I learned from my work on Game of Thrones with horses. Horses, of course, can smell fear. I think all animals can. I learned about slowing down my breathing, about very much respecting the animals in their environment and becoming part of their environment. So that when I was released on set for Episode 3, and 50 goats were unleashed, it was just divine.
Edwards: While we were shooting, the goats kept eating all the costumes, nibbling on them. We had the principal actors, Gwendolyn and Adam and Britt, all under the table. While they're shooting those scenes, the goats are just nibbling at their clothes the whole time. So we were constantly trying to make sure we didn't get holes.
Christie: Like the brilliant Adam Scott says, 'Goats do not care that they're on television.' Goats will do whatever they want while you're doing the scene. They will eat your clothes. They'll butt their heads against your knee. They'll climb up on the desk. They'll start opening the drawers. They'll start chewing your wig. I was ecstatic to be around so many animals that were clearly really enjoying themselves and enjoying the whole environment, the whole experience, including the goat that climbed up on the camera and appeared to be operating it, which is why the show is so great: it's actually directed by a goat.
Ben Stiller/Apple
Erickson: We actually discussed a couple different versions of it. There was a draft of Episode 2 where we made the reveal. But we wanted people to wonder [about Helly's identity] and we wanted people to live in that ambiguous space.
Stiller: One of the original ideas for the season was to do a corporate retreat. What would the looming corporate retreat be like for the innies? The idea was that Milchick was basically saying, 'OK, you guys did the Overtime Contingency [in the Season 1 finale, where the innies take over the bodies of their outies]. You went out to the world. You want to see the world? Well, this is what the real world is like.' So we thought, 'Let's get them out in the world and do this strange adventure.' We all went up into the Catskills for five weeks and had a great time.
Apple
Edwards: I was thinking North Face parkas [for their outfits]. And then Ben was 'No, I think it would be more like we're kind of going back in time and we're retracing the steps of Kier Egan and his brother Dieter.' So we started going back and looking at different explorers at the turn of the century. We took those shapes and we made them ourselves, and we used the silhouette, but we kind of modernized it, as if Mr. Milick had these made at Lumon and provided them. They were all wearing these belt buckles. Kier Egan with the little goats on the side. Sometimes you miss those details on television. Everything was so detailed.
Theodore Shapiro (composer): We got to Episode 4 and Woe's Hollow, I wrote another tune for Miss Huang to play on the theremin. The theremin is not an instrument that I've ever worked with before, and I have to give a lot of props to Sarah Bock [Miss Huang], who actually learned how to play the theremin and could play that piece. We didn't use her performance in the show, we used my pre-recording of it, but she could play it. And, oh man, I was very impressed.
Turturro: I was very happy to be out. I'd rather be out in the cold than in that office all day. You can freeze me to death out there and I'd stay out there. I don't like fluorescent lighting.
Lower: In the end, the elements were dangerous. It was freezing cold. The water was icy and full of rocks. We had an amazing safety team and stunt team who helped us keep physically safe. And John made me feel so safe in that scene so we could go where we needed to go emotionally.
Erickson: I watched the majority of this episode be shot from my deck in Silver Lake [in Los Angeles]. I was working on revisions for a future episode. So I was sitting in my deck chair with a glass of wine and watching the feed and being like, 'Oh, they look cold.'
Apple
Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Mr. Drummond): It was hard to be so mean to Tramell. He is such a great actor, and I think Milchick is trying to be the perfect employee. He has tried to do everything right, and yet he can feel the disrespect that they still have for him.
Tramell Tillman (Seth Milchick): You know, that guy Milchick, he's had his back up against the wall from day one. And now in this new leadership position, and what he had to do to get to that leadership position, he doesn't have a whole lot of space to exercise that energy out. And being face to face with an employer who is policing your speech on top of all the other things that you have done, it just got to be too much. And I think it was a wonderful moment where Milchick finally stood up for himself and told the man to back off.
Ólafsson: We have to be really careful in life, because there are people like Mr. Drummond who are willing to do anything and everything to push a certain cause. He just looks at a lot of the people he's working with as ants he can crush.
Tillman: I have to give credit to Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller for having the sensitivity to have a conversation with me about it and seeing if this is a story that we want to include. It's a risk to introduce race into the world of Keir and Lumon. But we took care of it, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it manifests even more. I'm also really excited about all the conversations that bloom from it about how people that are not part of the majority in their own offices are treated in corporate America.
Ben Stiller/Apple
Patricia Arquette (Harmony Cobel): For a long time, I've known about [Salt's Neck], the school growing up there, the factory town that the mom had gotten poisoned by the water, that she didn't really get a resolve with her mom. What else did I know? I knew that she had been very instrumental in the making of the Severance chip. I didn't know that she had done as much as she's claiming to do. I didn't know about the Glasgow Block or the blah, blah, blah. But I didn't even know that such a thing existed back then when we were first having the conversations.
She has this weird way of talking and I was like, this idea that she's got this affected voice that she thinks that's what power sounds like. And it's probably something she heard in school, and you hear it from her aunt, then see the space she actually grew up in. So this is a made-up voice of success, and it's become this corporate kind of sound now, that all these people are faking it. We're all faking it. But there's also an inscrutability when you're raised in an organization [that] you're not supposed to feel your feelings. You're supposed to swallow your feelings and you're not supposed to tell everyone what's going on or you'll get in trouble. You learn to play things close to the vest. And I don't think Harmony's ever been really safe in her life anywhere or with anyone. And then when we went to Salt Neck, it was like, 'Wow.'
Apple
Milchick and I are weirdly mirroring each other in our loneliness, in our own self-discovery of our different aspects. Cobel is alone and it's like, 'What's the truth?' and 'What's my past?' and 'Why am I not being seen in this way?' Cobel is working out some interior thing.
Ever since the very beginning, it was also very important to Ben that [Cobel] really cares for Mark.
So in a weird way, it's all these different kind of fractals of human beings. Yes, we have goats. Yes, we have a whole scientific procedure. But it's also, weirdly, these human aspects that I think do resonate with people, [something] that we are all struggling with in this weird time.
Erickson: It's funny because we weren't specifically looking for a musical performance, because we'd had a fairly memorable music-dance scene in the first season, and we weren't actively trying to go and replicate that. But at some point somebody mentioned a marching band as we were writing [the finale], and there's something about the enthusiasm and pomp of it, plus the fact that it's people moving in unison … there's always been something a little eerie about it to me.
Edwards: The last episode with the marching band — that was one of those things where it came out of left field, it was like a revision. And all of a sudden it was like, 'Sarah, we're going to have a Lumon marching band. And there's 150 of them and we're shooting it in three weeks.' I really wanted them to feel like they could, they were part of our world again. So we found this company in the Midwest that has been making band uniforms since the '60s. And we sent them our dream uniform with exactly how we wanted the Lumon written across it and the logos and the colorways. And we went back and forth and Ben had to approve all our samples. And we did a few camera tests in the space. And then we said, 'Please, can you rush these pretty please?' And they did. And we somehow managed to get all of those talented musicians in and get them all fit at a very breakneck pace.
Apple
Shapiro: As soon as that idea came to the fore, we were all working really hard at it. There had to be music. And so Ben sent me a couple of references that he really liked. He's a big fan of the movie Drumline, the Nick Cannon film. And so that was an inspiration. In the script, it was indicated that the first piece was going to be 'Kier's Hymn' but for a marching band. And the second piece was going to be this thing, the 'The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel.' My task was to write these marching band versions of these Egan hymns, and I just put the pieces together. The drumline had to be cool and funky and fun, and then we put these big tunes on top of them, and that's what we got.
Leven: The big thing for Ben was they had a band there, and he really wanted it to be a crowd and fill MDR. MDR is a really big space, so it was like, 'How many band members can we get because every additional band member is another costume, another instrument or whatever.' So they got the band members and then it was like, 'This area feels a little bit empty over here. Can you fill in with extra band members?' We'd fill in with extra band members digitally.
Tillman: It was so much fun. I have to be honest, I was a little nervous about doing the Choreography and Merriment scene because, you know, we had a dancing scene in Season 1 that was so iconic [the 'Defiant Jazz' interlude in Episode 7]. And it was very clear that we didn't want to repeat MDE [Music Dance Experience]. So when they said, 'Hey, we might have a marching band going in,' I'm like, 'Whoa. A marching band? This is kind of fun.' And I remember having the conversation with Ben and Dan about how Milchick would fall into place with this, whether he would be the band director or the drum major. And knowing that there were two different songs that were being played, I thought it was really brilliant that we had decided that the hymn would be more traditional in presentation, and then 'The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel,' that's when Milchick needs to let that flag fly. It was a blast.
Ben Stiller/Apple
Scott: Yeah, I don't think Cobel would've handled the rebellion in the same way.
Arquette: No, she would not have. And she should've been in charge!
Stiller: I don't think there's a freeze frame in The Graduate, is there? I don't think so. But there is that moment at the end. I think Mike Nichols is one of the most influential directors from before my generation and what he created in that last moment was this idea of the protagonist who finally gets what he wants, and then what? What happens for the rest of your life? And I think there's a similar sort of idea behind that. There's this weird sort of dichotomy of them running off into the sunset together, but then it's also kind of into the bowels of Lumon and this scary idea of what lies in front of them. So there were elements of that. And then the freeze frame was just something I enjoyed. Movies growing up, '60s and '70s French New Wave, early '70s movies, used that idea of let's freeze this moment in time. A lot of those different ideas were in that, for sure.
Apple
Lower: I kept running and running. And I was barefoot.
Scott: Innie Mark is thinking about what's right in front of him, and what's right in front of him is someone that he knows as Ms. Casey. Going through the door would maybe mean the end of his life. But the person he's in love with is right down the hall. I don't think either of them are thinking that far ahead. They're just going with their gut and making a decision for themselves.
Lachman: It felt kind of cathartic to actually be present on the show, present on the actual set, in the physical sense, and to work with these extraordinary people. I kept crying a little bit afterwards because it just went so deep, especially when you're shouting at the top of your lungs.
Arquette: Yes, I read all the scripts. Yes, I knew what was going on. But to see it realized on film, this introspection about love and self and moving forward and shutting off parts of a soul is very interesting, and I don't know if that is plotted.
Stiller: It set up a lot of intriguing possibilities for the audience to see. Mark and Helly run down that hallway into this very uncertain future.
Jen Tullock (Devon Scout-Hale): It's been funny and very middle-school to see the Gemma vs. Helly camps. There's a lot of 'justice for Gemma,' which I love, and I'm excited to see what happens. I truly have no idea where we'll go. I would give anything to work more with Dichen. I think she's so gifted and she's such a lovely human being. The way she has crafted both of those characters with such care for the difference between them, it blows my mind. So it'd be funny to see Devon interact with Ms. Casey too. We'll see.
Lachman: I just can't wait to see what Dan comes up with.
Stiller: It's just been fun to see how many more people discovered it in the second season. [With] the first season, I felt like we had a loyal audience that really got the show. But this season, it just felt like so many more people were watching it. And the level of engagement that you're talking about, the fan art, and how they create videos and paintings and pictures and [all the] interaction is something that's really exciting for me to experience.
Scott: I think the art has been really overwhelming for me. Just seeing the amount of artwork that's inspired by the show, I've been trying to post a bunch of it on Instagram. I know a few of us have. I've just been trying to get it out there, because it really is impressive, and it really is flattering to be a part of something that's inspiring people to make stuff.
Arquette: It's like they're making their own spinoff shows, basically. Like there's [people] and their friends talking about what their innie is into and what their outie is like. And it's really cute to see that. I haven't had that kind of engagement on any show.
Lachman: It really does pull you in like no other show does, and engages you on a cellular level, doesn't it? It's so heartwarming to do something and see it affect people so much. Also creatively. The artwork they've created.
Stiller: I don't think I've ever had that with something I've done. Obviously, it's our jobs, it's what we spend our time doing, so you put a lot of yourself into it. But then to feel that the response to it has an equal commitment from the audience is something I haven't experienced before, and that feels great.
Scott: We watched the finale with an audience, with a huge audience of like 3,000 people. And to watch it with this crowd, and when Trammell first comes on screen and the place goes nuts, and then the elevator opens on Dylan and the place goes nuts. It was like, 'Holy shit, this is like Star Wars or something.' What is going on? People love these guys and it's just so much fun.
Ben Stiller/Apple
Erickson: I mean, Season 1 we had COVID. Season 2 was the strikes. I was worried about this asteroid that they were talking about for a while, but apparently that's not going to hit us, they're saying.
Scott: It was at a cool 2 percent.
Erickson: Yeah, I think that's down to 1 [percent] now.
Stiller: With our luck, though, it's going to come right at us. ... No, there's no intention to be that long at all. We want to try to get it out as soon as possible.
Arquette: When people ask, 'How long is it going to be?', the inner Cobel in me says, 'It's going to be as long as it needs to be. And you're going to wait. As long as it takes.'
— Additional reporting by Christian Holub, Marcus James Dixon, and Kevin P. Sullivan
A version of this story first appeared in Gold Derby's digital Emmys issue on June 5, 2025.
Ben Stiller/Apple
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