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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Patricia Arquette's ‘Severance' character talks like that because ‘she thinks that's what power sounds like'
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. More from GoldDerby 'Ballerina' targets $35 million opening in box-office clash with 'Lilo & Stitch' 'Brilliant Minds' creator Michael Grassi on how his love of Oliver Sacks inspired NBC's new medical drama The Making of 'The Eyes of the World: From D-Day to VE Day': PBS variety special 'comes from the heart' READ: '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.' Best of GoldDerby The Making of 'The Eyes of the World: From D-Day to VE Day': PBS variety special 'comes from the heart' From 'Hot Rod' to 'Eastbound' to 'Gemstones,' Danny McBride breaks down his most righteous roles: 'It's been an absolute blast' Jay Duplass on exposing his 'dad bod' and playing a 'soft villain' in 'Dying for Sex': 'Easily one of my biggest acting challenges' Click here to read the full article.
Scotsman
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Album reviews: Gloria Estefan Lavinia Blackwall
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Gloria Estefan: Raices (Crescent Moon/Sony Music Latin) ★★★ Faith Eliott: Dryas (Lost Map) ★★★★★ Lavinia Blackwall: The Making (The Barne Society) ★★★★ Latin superstar Gloria Estefan marks 50 years in music with her first Spanish language album in almost two decades. Raices, meaning 'roots', is a vibrant exploration of her Cuban-American heritage, written and produced by her husband Emilio Estefan. Its title track is a joyous Cubano catharsis, with lyrics translating as 'if you want a good harvest, you need to know how to sow, with faith and dedication, that tree will grow roots'. Gloria Estefan | Crescent Moon/Sony Music Latin Elsewhere, Estefan helms the big band clamour and salsa explosion of La Vecina (No Se Na) with infectious verve, delivers impassioned balladeering on Tan Iguales y Tan Diferentes, accompanied by Spanish guitar and lush orchestration, and settles into a gentler middle of the road sway on Cuando el Tiempo Nos Castiga. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Edinburgh-based singer/songwriter Faith Eliott is something special, following up debut album Impossible Bodies with another imaginative dive into science, nature and mythology. Dryas is a gorgeous, gentle, poignant and hopeful folk pop fantasia, where the elemental intersects with the digital. Eliott dives into apocalypse stories on snowglobe, weaves a sparse, gothic anthropomorphic yarn on thys creatur and presides beautifully over an ode of unrequited love from a hagfish to a giant isopod, where the needy meets the unavailable on the ocean floor. Faith Eliott | Contributed Trembling Bells frontwoman Lavinia Blackwall is a similarly bold stylist. Her latest solo album is a full folk band fiesta in the spirit of Pentangle and Steeleye Span with her own soaring vocal as the star instrument. Maggie Reilly of Moonlight Shadow fame guests on My Hopes Are All Mine, a bitter tale of inequality, themed round the creaky turning of the wheel of fortune. Laura J Martin adds ye olde recorder part to the folk fable Scarlett Fever, while Blackwall veers into plaintive baroque pop on We All Get Lost and lets loose her inner Kate Bush on the glam eccentricity of Morning To Remember. CLASSICAL Yeol Eum Sol: Ravel & Bach (Naïve) ★★★★ Yet more Maurice Ravel to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, this time from dynamic South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son with The Hague's Residentie Orkest under Anja Bihlmaier. Both Son and Bihlmaier have hugely impressed live audiences in Scotland of late, performing with the SCO and BBC SSO respectively. But here they are together in a Ravel piano concerto double bill – the scintillating G major and hybrid Left Hand Concerto (written for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War) – and the teamwork is exemplary. Son brings freshly-conceived excitement to the G major, a glorious mix of zestfulness and laid-back poeticism, woozy and bluesy in the slow movement, pyrotechnically scintillating in the Finale, with Bihlmaier deploying lightning orchestral fire in response. The Left Hand Concerto is weightier, but still possesses drive and determined musicality. Son ends with four left hand solo transcriptions by Wittgenstein. Ken Walton JAZZ Tom Lyne with Dave Milligan: Well Mixed Blue (LisaLeo Records) ★★★★ Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
