Patricia Arquette's ‘Severance' character talks like that because ‘she thinks that's what power sounds like'

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15 hours ago

Even after two seasons of Severance, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) remains an enigma. The woman occasionally known as 'Mrs. Selvig' seems like the ultimate example of Lumon's management style, and yet she herself is constantly at loggerheads with her superiors. She apparently invented the severance procedure as we know it, and yet helps Mark Scout (Adam Scott) break through it.
Many mysteries remain as Severance fans look forward to Season 3, but certain things about Cobel can be explained in the meantime. In a new interview with Gold Derby, Arquette says that she is responsible for both the character's look and her mannered way of speaking.
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'When I was first thinking of building that character, I saw her with silver hair, white hair,' Arquette says. 'I felt like her hair should be a little older than she is. But also I wanted to have this affected, weird voice. I liked this idea that she's got this affected voice because she thinks that's what power sounds like. That's what these middle managers sound like. It's probably something she heard in school and you hear it a little bit from her aunt when you see the squalor she actually grew up in. So this is a made-up voice, a voice of success, and it's become this corporate sound.'
Arquette continues, 'there's also an inscrutability when you're raised in an organization or structure [like Lumon], where 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. I don't think Harmony's ever been really safe in her life anywhere or with anyone. And then when we went to Salt's Neck, it was like, 'Wow, this is a very Bergman-looking color palette, with actual icebergs floating by.' If your character looked like a piece of nature, she would look like an iceberg.'
Cobel was not as prominent in Severance Season 2 as she was in Season 1, since she lost her position both at Lumon and as Mark's next-door neighbor. But she was able to take the spotlight in the episode 'Sweet Vitriol,' in which viewers followed Cobel back to her hometown of Salt's Neck — once the location of a major Lumon ether factory, now a left-behind wasteland full of poverty and addiction.
Among other things, the episode revealed that Cobel basically invented the severance chip, despite getting little credit for it. It seems like a paradox that the Lumon employee responsible for its most important technology also defies upper management as often as Harmony does, but Arquette says that paradox is central to Severance.
'It may seem like a perversion, but honestly, her interior unresolved story informs the creation of the severance chip,' Arquette says. 'She's trying to prove something through this thing. There is a synchronicity between the severance chip and her interior landscape. They are very closely wedded to each other, these two things. It's not accidental.'
The epidemic of ether addiction that pervades present-day Salt Neck is also no accident. Think of it, Arquette says, like an earlier attempt at separating people's work memories from the rest of their life.
'Ben [Stiller] wanted this rotting factory town,' Arquette says of Salt Neck. 'This is an early version of Lumon's attempt to create a corporate town, and these are the vestiges left over after the poisoning of the water and the ether factory and everyone becoming addicts. In a weird way, ether is an early form of severance. It's like the drug of forgetting. So what if you could forget, like with ether, but without the drug? Well then you would need a chip, and that's severance.'
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