The following interview contains spoilers from the first season of Severance.
Outies rejoice. At long last, an in-depth look at the long-awaited new season of Severance has arrived. Not only did our favorite macrodata refiners (along with their superviser Mr. Milchick) stop by CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil to reveal the first five minutes season 2's January 17 premiere, they also stuck around to debut a brand-new trailer for fans in at the event's epic Thunder Stage (think Hall H but louder).
IGN caught up with with the show's creator and executive producer Dan Erickson along with Adam Scott (Mark S.), Britt Lower (Helly R.), and Trammell Tillman (Milchick) before they went out on stage to talk about how they prep for such a complex show and what, if anything, they can tell us about Season 2.
IGN: What exactly from this trailer are fans going to go crazy for? Is there one big moment or one big thing that you anticipate they're going to have a lot of questions about between now and January?
Dan Erickson (Creator / Executive Producer): Yes! It was funny as we were sort of working with various people on the trailer and trying to decide what we could and couldn't show. At first, we sort of went through the season and we were like, "Okay, well we can't show that. Well, we can't show that. Obviously we can't show that." And we sort of got to the end and had nothing. So we had to ease up our standards a little bit. But I think that, yeah, I mean (the trailer shows) new rooms that we have not been to and you see some of that in the trailer.
IGN: Adam, Britt, I imagine it must be a very interesting acting opportunity and challenge to play what's essentially two characters. The innies and outies share similarities, but they're completely different. Can you talk about the challenge that comes with being able to do that on a single show?
Adam Scott (Mark Scout): I think from the start it was important to all of us that they feel like the same person, but just different parts of the same person rather than two wildly different people or wildly different characters. It's almost different halves of the same person. They share the same body, physiologically. You walk in to work even in the first episode of Season 1, Mark walks in with emotions from the outside. And like Petey says, "Sometimes we would see you and know that you had been crying and you bring that in with you." So there are things that you bring inside and that you bring outside at the end of the day, but it's just a matter of syncing that up and figuring out what the similarities are and then what the differences are.
Britt Lower (Helly R. / Helena Eagan): There's a shared subconscious and some shared values that the characters have. I tried to start from that place and then differentiate based on the given circumstances and the competing forces of the inside and the outside. But these are both sides of a person who's trapped in both circumstances, just in different ways within the same company. (I try) to have empathy for both sides of that. All I can say is they sound like different music inside of me and they have a different rhythm and frequency.
IGN: Trammell, Milchick is not severed, but there's a dichotomy in him in that there's certain information that he can project, but also a lot of information that he has to protect. What, in your mind, does Milchick want? And how does his relationship with the macrodata refiners progress throughout Season 2?
Trammell Tillman (Milchick): Milchick needs a friend. I think Milchick really wants to serve Kier. He wants to do his job and do it well. And his relationship with MDR, the innies, is one where he has to manage it in such a way that he can do his job. And him being the protector of such information gives him the power to manipulate, to control, to keep the train on the track as much as possible. And we see through Season 1 how successful and unsuccessful he is at times. (What relationships he does have are) kind of ambiguous because we just don't know, which speaks to the mystery of the show.
IGN: Dan, when you're creating a show like this, there are aconstant competing interests in that you have to satisfy fans by answering some questions, but you also have to keep them engaged and wanting to find out more. How difficult is that from a writing and showrunning perspective to constantly be on that wheel?
Erickson: It's very difficult and fortunately I had a lot of collaborators who, we sort of put our heads together and we came up with what we thought was the best possible balance for that. You don't want to make people feel like they're on that hamster wheel forever and they're never going to actually learn anything. At the same time, I think what people love about the show is this sense of mystery, and (a) sense of the unknown, and that there's this fun, charming, almost comic dynamic happening in the foreground. And then this scary thing building in the background. So, the question, to me, the key was always when you reveal a mystery, you have to replace it with another mystery or reveal a bigger mystery outside of it so that over the course of the show you're building up to something bigger. But it is tough. It is tough to get that balance, and I think a lot of shows that go for multiple seasons, they have to sort of figure it out as they go.
IGN: Britt, towards the end of Season 1, there's this huge reveal where we meet Helly's outie. Going into Season 2, you're basically stepping into a completely new character. How big of a challenge was that?
Lower: Well, I think the world of Lumen informs the character quite a lot because that's what she was born into and indoctrinated into, and I think you learn a lot about what it must be like to be Helena based on how strange her dad is in that final episode of Season 1. You can kind of extrapolate from there what her day-to-day life must feel like, and I just try to empathize with that perspective as much as possible.
IGN: Adam, obviously at the end of Season 1, we have Mark's innie revealing that his outie’s wife is still alive. That's a huge moment. How does that affect both Mark’s innie and outie going into Season 2?
Scott: Yeah, I mean he has this enormous piece of information. In Season 1, gradually he's becoming more and more disillusioned with this company that he believes in, that is his whole life. But I think he thought he had hit the ceiling of the depravity that Lumen was capable of. And I think this final piece of information goes beyond any expectation that he ever had of how horrible something could be. I don't think he ever imagined that someone would do something so terrible to another person. So this is a huge piece of information and yeah, Season 2 is about what he's going to do with that piece of information. And then whether or not that piece of information is going to reach his outie.
For more information about everything revealed at CCXP 2024, check out our round-up.
