S1E3: In Perpetuity (with Britt Lower)

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I'm Adam Scott.

I'm Ben Stiller.

And this is the Severance Podcast with Ben and Adam, where we break down every episode of Severance. And today we'll be recapping season one, episode three, In Perpetuity, written by Andrew Colville and directed by Ben Stiller.
Ben, speaking of, how are you doing? I'm doing well. I live in the New York area, so it's always nice this time of year, you know, when you get to actually feel the chill of winter.
Sure, you get the sweaters out. Yeah, and it's very festive, and it's festive all the way through New Year's, right? And then there's like four months of just, you know, pain.
Yeah, then I've noticed this living on the East Coast now for two full falls and winters making severance. I had never spent that chunk of the year on the East Coast exclusively.
And so I've noticed the wonderful fall. And then after New Year's, sort of by the end of January, you hit a wall of hardship weather-wise that just pushes through all the way till what? In March? No, I'd say end of April.
End of April. Definitely.
Yeah. That's when the leaves start to come on the trees.
And I always, now now am aware of the leaves coming back on the trees because we're always in a race to try to finish filming the season before the leaves come back. And we never make it.
And we always end up having to then shoot until the very last wintry moment. And then we go inside and shoot some more.
And then sometimes we have to figure out ways to make the leaves go away in different ways. That's right.
It's usually the springtime when off in the distance, I see giant plastic sheets of white covering nearby hillsides and blank spaces to make it look like it's still snowing because Severance is a winter show. Yeah.
And even when we're not filming the show because we've gone through it a couple of times now i have this sort of uh pavlovian reaction to when you know when are the leaves when are the buds i'm like looking at the the branches waiting for the buds to come out and feeling stressed because i think we're not going to be able to get our winter shots done that'll be with you for the rest of your life yes one of the gifts of making the making the show. One of the many gifts.
That's right. Also, I just have to say it's the daylight savings time or the going back to standard time or whatever it is.
It's just awful. And I know, you know, this is not a political show and I don't want to get political at all.
But, you know, can we please have daylight savings time all the time?

Can we have our hour back?

Is that what you're... Yeah.

And I don't know why that's controversial.

Maybe we can ask Britt Lauer when she's here.

Yeah.

Our guest today is Britt Lauer, our own Helly R.

We talked about her the last couple episodes.

I think it was touch and go there if she was going to do the podcast or not. Deep in negotiations.
Oh, was it tough to get her for this? Oh, man. Oh, you have no idea.
I mean, I wasn't involved, but I heard. I'm curious.
I'm curious what her resistance was. Well, we can ask her about it.
Can I just say about Daylight Savings Time? Yeah. I believe it was invented for farming.

Am I right about that?

Are you asking me?

Because I'm not,

I am not the person to ask.

Was it invented for farming?

You know,

what I know is that

whenever you say

we should have permanent

daylight savings time,

I hear sort of anecdotally

farmers won't like that.

Yeah.

And I am pro-farming and I don't want to make

farmers' lives tougher, but I also feel like

just for our mental health, it's sometimes, you know,

just seeing it get dark at four o'clock

or one day it's dark at 5.30 and that's already tough.

And then all of a sudden the next day it's dark at 4.30.

Yeah.

But I will say I hate losing the hour of sleep, but I do like it when it gets dark earlier. I think it's kind of cool.
I do. Yeah.
I like like five o'clock. It's nighttime.
I'm completely diametrically opposed to you on this issue. If it were up to you, it would be full daylight 24 hours a day that's what you're saying no i'm not like a strange i don't know i want to have i want to have darkness and i love sleeping too oh i just okay i just sounded to me like you were a fan of daytime all the time no i like daytime better than nighttime when i'm awake if that makes sense sure you hate the night you hate darkness no I like daytime better than nighttime when I'm awake, if that makes sense.
Sure. You hate the night.
You hate darkness. No, I like the night too.
It's just, you know. All right.
I think we've settled it. I feel good.
Good. I'm glad.
That's why people listen to this podcast. 100%.
Just to hear the daylight savings time debate. But we'll make it a weekly feature.
Don't worry. We will be talking about daylight savings time for at least 15 minutes uh per episode or maybe like a farmer's almanac sort of yes section where we just talk about something that's in the almanac for this day should we move on should we get to our guest yes okay here she is brit.
Welcome to the podcast. Hello.
Britt. You know, I know that it took me a long time to decide whether I was going to do this podcast because, you know, I come from a long line of farmers on both sides of my family.
And I heard there was some shade being thrown on Daylight Savings Time on this podcast. Not by me.
No. I guess some people, Britt, just between you and I, I don't know if Ben can hear this part.
Some people don't care where their soybeans come from. Some people don't care where their broccoli comes from.
They just want daylight to come and go as they please. Wow.
Britt, seriously though, farmers, seriously? Yeah, yeah, apple farmers on my mom's side of the family and corn and soybeans and regular stuff on the other side. And what town are you from? I am from a very small farm town with one blinking red traffic light.
And it was 20 minutes south of a town called Normal, Illinois, which is a real place. And you grew up there all the way up until you graduated high school and went off to school.
You were in this small town. Yeah, that's right.
It's the kind of town where you know everyone's middle name. Sure.
Yeah. Can I just say? Yeah.
You are so perfect in the show that when you auditioned, what I felt when I saw your audition was this is the person that I didn't know in my imagination that I imagined. And this is Helly.
Wow. Thank you, Ben.
That's so kind. It's 100% true.
Britt, do you want to just tell us how you first heard about the show and then we can kind of talk about how you auditioned and all that stuff? Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you, Ben.
I think that was really apparent to me season one when we were filming because I think you exclusively called me Helly. And then in season two, I individuated and became Brit.
You reminded me that you had a real name. I was like, hey, I'm Brit.
But, yeah, I, you know, it was one of those, one of those things where your agents call you and they're like, hey, we've read this really special script. And there's a role we think you're right for.
And it's a real long shot. And I was kind of working in relative obscurity for long enough to believe them when they said that.
And, you know, this was prior to COVID. So you were still doing in-person auditions at that time.
and initially you guys just had so many people signed up to audition that there was no slot

available and so my agents were like can you just make a really good self-tape in your house? And yeah, it was, you know, I read the script and it was that moment where you're falling in love with the characters and the story and the whole world that Dan created. And you're, you know, my heart is kind of breaking because I'm just hearing like, oh, it's a long shot in my head.
And I was thinking, man, it's going to really break my heart when I don't get to play Helly. And you did make, you made a tape.
And Ben, do you want to talk about that tape a little bit? Because I remember hearing about the tape before Britt came in the room. Yeah, you made this tape.
It's the first scene on the table. And I think you shot it, were you in your bathroom? I was in my bathroom.
It's good lighting. Yeah, you're on the floor of your bathroom.
And you did this whole scene where you have to wake up and figure out where you are. And it was so cinematic.
And you really took your time. And as I was watching, and I was just thinking, oh, wow.
You just get that feeling when right off the bat, you go, well, this is somehow in my mind what I had imagined. It was really unusually good.
Oh, thanks, guys. Well directed.
It just looked great, and it just felt, like Ben said earlier, it just felt right. Thank you.
You know, I have to give probably two things credit. First, probably the courage that you get from thinking you're never going to get the job.

Right.

you know and I was like well I get to be Helly today and so I might as well just like enjoy this character in the comfort of my bathroom um and the other thing was that I had just

directed my first film a couple of months prior in which I acted in that film too. So I was kind of in the rhythm of watching myself and having a kind of critical eye and not taking anything too personally.
What was it that you connected with when you first read her? She is just, she's so unapologetic. She's brave and defiant.
And she has this kind of feral quality, but she also has a sense of humor about it, which was in Dan's writing. And I was like, how fun is this to play the rebel who knows exactly what she wants and how to go about getting it? That strength of her character, that's what I always loved from the beginning, was just that she really was a force.
And for me, it always felt like Mark and Helly were these sort of dual protagonists. And actually watching these early episodes, that tension between Mark's sort of company man innocence and Helly's sort of strength of her will, it's just such a great tension.
Yeah. And it's so great watching these first three episodes and seeing the collision course that begins from the moment Helly arrives and Mark just trying to maintain some semblance of order and consistency, but her just sort of awakening this thing in him that he just keeps trying to resist.
And Helly doesn't give up. Yeah, she's this sort of catalyst for asking questions.
I think 80% of my dialogue in season one were questions, like, what the hell is going on here? Like, what is this? Why? It's very much that kind of teenage energy of just like, but why? Why? Have you tried it? And then it slowly starts to dawn on, I think the other characters probably also had their moments of rebellion when they first entered the office, but they've been kind of beat down and brainwashed and, know they've tried and tried but they've kind of come into this status quo and i think we talked about this a little adam that like the currency between heli and mark finally coming into an alliance is that that like exchange of of like breaking the rules and mark in i think it's in the um the red ball scene whatever that's called that's that's what i was just about to say yeah yeah he's like the red ball scene the red ball scene when he breaks protocol that's in a different that's in the previous episode but um there's like just a little glimmer of his rule following uh cracking there yeah well funny thing is, is that he broke the rules.

And I don't know if the actual breaking of the rules that he did in secret when no one was around, if that was because of Hellie. But him telling everyone was certainly because of Hellie.
He wanted her to hear that. And that's almost more important than him actually doing it, is that he was willing to put it out there in front of Milchick just because he wanted her to know that he can do it too.
Yeah, she totally is the influence on Mark. But it's also interesting too that the first few episodes, I feel like the audience is seeing this world through Helly's eyes.
Yeah. Even though Mark is, you know, it's his story supposedly in the beginning, Helly is the person that we are identifying with.
And I think, you know, advocating in a way for what you think you might do in this kind of situation and like you said with a great sense of humor and with style and you're just like

she's just cool yeah okay let's take a lot more going on than you see. It's a little bit creepy.
I agree, there are more Q's than A's in this place. Yeah, for sure.
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Listen to and follow What We Spend, an Odyssey original podcast, available now wherever you get your podcasts. We're going to dig into episode three, which is one of my favorite episodes, actually.
Tell me why that is. Just because there's so much stuff we did to set up the world and looking back on it, having not looked at it for a while, I feel like there's just so many fun little severancy moments in terms of like the hallucinations and funny Rick and stuff.
And there's some action. And then there's animatrons and there's, you know, just all like the weird fun stuff

of the world of the show.

Yeah, and we get a lot of the really fun gear of the world

that I feel like is integrated into the show

in a really interesting way.

But it's not overdone.

It's not lingered upon for too long.

It is in there for functionality.

Yeah, for sure. For sure.
Okay. When episode three in perpetuity begins, we find out that Petey is in fact alive at the end of episode two.
We saw him showering in Mark's basement. He passes out.
We did not know what was going to happen with him. he is alive, but the reintegration process has left him with something that he calls reintegration sickness, and it has a bunch of terrible side effects.
Ben, do you want to describe reintegration sickness a little bit and what's going on there? Yeah, I think it has different symptoms. Probably the biggest one is that the hallucinations are not really knowing where you are.
So what we're seeing is PD going back and forth between his innie and his outie. And we're seeing that happen.
At the same time, there's also physical effects where he's getting nosebleeds, he's coughing. And, you know, that was one of the things when we were figuring out how to do the show was how to do these sort of fantastical sequences that didn't have a lot of visual effects.

We tried to keep everything as sort of homegrown.

And I have to say that for me, it's like a big part of that is just watching the work of people like Michelle Gondry or Chris Nolan, people who really have a facility, I think, with doing sci-fi stuff in a very grounded way visually. And so that was sort of what we tried to go for in terms of mixing these realities and actually having physical objects in different places.
And we do that throughout the episode. And that was fun.
It was fun to figure out as we went along and watching this episode i realized we we actually established a lot of rules that we follow for the rest of the of the show yeah watching the episode i saw that too i was like oh my god this is where all of this sort of began and came into play as we get a little deeper into the episode i want to talk about how you how you guys really did some of that. So we see the effects of this reintegration sickness.
He's staying in Mark's basement. Mark tells Petey a couple of times that he doesn't want to reintegrate because he lost his wife.
He just wants to disassociate. He's fine.
This whole severing thing is really working for him. Let's hear a quick clip of this interaction.
I just want to let you know, I'm not going to reintegrate. Okay.
I lost my wife a couple of years ago in a car accident. This is, uh, it's helping me.

I'm sorry, Mark.

No, no, no.

At work,

you'd come in sometimes

with red eyes.

We had a joke that you had an elevator allergy. There was even a song for it.
But I always wondered. You carry the hurt with you.
You feel it down there, too. You just don't know what it is.
Which is also the incredible Yul Vasquez as Petey. And Britt, this conversation, this thing that Petey's saying to Mark here about like your feelings filter through down there.
You just don't know what it is. You don't know what these feelings are.
Is that something you thought about at all with Helly down there? the stuff that kind of pushes through, whether it be just like puffy eyes or an actual feeling? Yeah, I think we talked a lot about that, like what is shared from the Audi. And, you know, obviously their subconscious is a shared space.
So whether that's their dreams or just something they're not even aware of, but also the trauma that's stored in their bodies, you know, so the grief and when he says that line, you know, you take it with you. It's like, yeah, I, you know, what part of Heli, I had to kind of go into season one with, you know, some, some knowledge of, of Heli's Audi, of course.
But for the most part, I allowed myself to be kind of in the dark about what was going on with Helena. So that Heli was kind of on this really physical journey of trying to figure out what was going on and being hungry to figure out those clues.

Sure. I remember this stuff was really the first dialogue stuff we shot the whole show.

Yeah. And looking at it, I really feel like it captures the isolated quality about the whole thing.

There's a line that Dan has early on when you say

the neighborhood never really filled out there. And I've always thought that was interesting, the idea of what is this townhouse community.
And as we see in this show going forward, this episode particularly, what are the connections of this place with Lumen itself? and we're getting a sense of Lumen having reach. We see it, you know, we see it even in the town in episode two when the whole Mind Collective kids are protesting, you see that statue of Keir that they're under.
Yeah. And the name of the town is Keir.
And the tentacles of Lumen and Kier Egan are everywhere.

It's everywhere.

And if you notice later on when Ms. Kobel slash Ms.
Selvig breaks into Mark's house, she has her own key to his house.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also, we see Ms. Selvig baking her shitty cookies.

Yeah.

Watching you through the window.

Yeah. And has the messiest apartment in the whole series.
Totally. You noticed, right? It's, yeah.
I mean, it's like there's stuff everywhere. It's very weird.
And she really cares. She's like caught up in Mark's life outside of the company.
She's like, oh, no, like really sort of involved. Yeah, I thought that was interesting.
It's one of the few times we see inside of Selvig, Cobell's house. And I think she has a little sign up by her window that says you must be cut to heal.
So there's like a little Egan philosophy there. That was one of the first things to be shot with patricia too and oh it was yeah yeah interesting and you know just as directing patricia it's just she's so good and brit i'm sure you have interesting experiences working with patricia but you just never know where she's gonna go and just shooting those close-ups of her watching She just has such a great, fun, mysterious quality, and it's funny and scary and everything.
Yeah, the vulnerability and the wheels turning. I feel like when I first was working with Patricia, before a take, she would sort of whisper what her inner thoughts were to me.
And I think one time she was like, you little rascal or something like that. And I was like, this is so great.
Like I'm getting just this little insight. That's great.
Okay. So then we go back to work and we see Annie Mark back in MDR and he finds an envelope with new group photos at his desk.
But then Helly tells him not to bother putting those out because she submitted her resignation request and is getting out. And we pretty quickly find out that her resignation request has been denied.
And then this episode kind of ends up being at least partly about Helly's various attempts to escape, just different ways of trying to get the hell out of here. Yeah.
I love how upbeat and sure you are that you're going to get out. I know.
It's so heartbreaking. Yeah.
At this point, she thinks it's still her versus the machine, you know, her versus the man. And she's not yet clued into the fact that it's, it's her own self.
So she's, she's like, of course, like I just put it in and it's kind of sad how happy she is about it. I also noticed, um, Milchick.
I think this is where we really see his photographer character come out. And I wanted to ask Ben, did Tramiel's portrayal of photographer in the office space influence your character Bendo? This is a really good question.
All right. This is what we're going to talk about Bendo.
All right.

We have to introduce Bendo.

Bendo is a character that Adam actually named me because I started bringing my Leica film camera on the set to take pictures.

And I was basically Bendo, the worst set photographer in the business.

Always getting in your eyeline.

Yeah.

Because your camera didn't have a silent click on it.

It didn't have a blimp or anything.

And it's one old school camera.

You hear the shutter.

And it's kind of the same camera that Tramiel is using,

only we have his branded as a Lumen camera,

but it's really a Leica.

And I would just, yeah, just not even make an attempt to, I'd just get right in the way and get right in the eyeline. And quite gymnastically.
Yeah, agile. Yeah, you just bend your body and get the shot.
Right. And it was always just like, oh, sorry, and then jumping right out of the way.
You know, it's still. Don't ask for permission.
You took some amazing photos though, Ben. True.
Well, I had, I had years, I had years to work at it because we shot, it took us, well, we had like a nine month plus shoot on season one and on season two is even longer. So Helly's trying to get out.
She, as we said, submitted the resignation request, which her Audi denies.

She tries to evade the code detectors by writing on her arms, which we have to say now, along with your iconic wardrobe, what I've noticed with people dressing up like Ellie for Halloween is they often write on their arms from the scene.

Totally.

What does it say on there? Let me out. Yeah, let me out.
Let me out, yeah. You also try to eat a pen cap with a note folded up inside of it, prompting Mark to explain that Milchick would have to forcibly extract any ingested messages himself.
It's one of the first scenes where he kind of comes down hard on her and is kind of like gross with her and then i made sure i had a lot of saliva in that uh pen cap to spit onto your hand in retaliation yeah we let the dribble the dribble moment happen um we then go to outside and we see Devin and Rickon are dropping off Rickon's book at Mark's house.

Yeah. go to outside and we see um devon and rick in or are dropping off rick in's book at mark's house yeah that scene is so funny this is where we uh start to get a feel for the devon and rick in relationship and how incredibly insecure and self-obsessed he is michael churness and jen toleck just being incredible in that scene.
Yeah.

And him sort of obsessing on where to leave his book gift for Mark on the front stoop. And it has a sprig of pine on it, I think, or something.
Yes. Warship does.
Our incredible prop department headed up by Cat Miller. and then he drops the book off

and we see Cobell come out of her house

or in her selvig well she's actually in her cobell attire because she's heading to work after yeah yeah she's about to go to work that's right so she waits till the coast is clear she goes to the front door and pulls out a key and we learned that lumen has access to Mark's house. 100%.
And her being in Cobell attire makes it all the more confusing once she's in the basement and Petey sees her. In your thinking, Ben, does that sort of trigger him a little bit seeing her down there in the first place, but also her being not selvig attire but being in cobel attire i think it might we were thinking about that also but in the scene right before that you see that pd is already hallucinating and he thinks he's in the office with you and that's that's one of those scenes where we sort of doubled up the office cubicle in the basement so we actually brought the cubicle into the the basement.
Yeah, I wanted you to kind of talk about all that and how you guys did that. Yeah, it was pretty simple.
It was just basically, we would shoot a version of the scene, Petey in his robe, in the basement on the couch. Then we did a version of the scene in the basement on the couch, but there was the cubicle there and you were there.

And there's these whip pans where the camera goes between the two of you.

So we actually did the whip pan between you and Petey,

but we did a version where you were in the cubicle with him in the basement.

Then we did a version where he was in his suit, but he was also in the basement.

And then we went to the MDR set and we shot a version where Petey was in the cubicle in his regular work clothes and then a version where Petey was in his robe. And so we had all these different sort of variations of it that we would then just do the scene and then we just, in the editing room, would intercut between the different versions of it.
And my favorite part of that whole scene is you saying, what's that you're doing? Sudoku?

I know. You loved that so much.
Was that Sudoku?

Sudoku.

I just remember doing that line exactly like that because you liked it so much so many times because we were doing it in the basement, like you said, with different costume configurations and then at the office.

And then that shot of him coming out of the bathroom being like, dude, and talking to me about Cobell and me in any Mark attire, not recognizing who Cobell is. Right, exactly.
It's so fun to watch all of that and to kind of try and unpack it as a viewer. It's really fun.
It really reminded me of Eternal Sunshine, when the memories are kind of dissolving into each other. Completely inspired, ripped off from brilliant Michelle Gondry, who directed Eternal Sunshine and is just an amazingly creative film director.
And I felt like we had to figure out our own sort of language for the show. And we came up with this little idea, too, of dollying over one shoulder to the next to try to use that as a sort of a wipe between the two realities.
And we played around with that. But the goal was to use as few visual effects as possible.
And just to hear you say Sudoku, Sudoku, Sudoku, Sudoku, as many times as possible. Taking the four desk cubicle, transferring it from MDR to the basement is no easy task, right? That is a big piece of furniture, very heavy.
Yes. That cubicle is a very bespoke, unique thing that Jeremy Hindle designed.
And as we were figuring it out, because it was written in the script as, you know, they're all together at a cubicle, but I'd never really directed a pilot for an ongoing series. I directed limited series and sketch comedy and movies and stuff but knowing the responsibility of this set because i knew that if the show were to be successful this set is going to go on for a long time and we're going to be shooting a lot in here so you really are thinking like what are we going to be able to do in this space as you know on in episode six, seven, eight.
And... To, like, keep it visually interesting.

Yeah. So you really are thinking, what are we going to be able to do in this space on episode six, seven, eight? To keep it visually interesting.
Yeah, and just knowing you're going to be in this place. You're going to have to figure out how to do scenes.
And one of the cool things about the set that we figured out was that we could have the dividers come up and down and have them at any height. So that really for whatever scene, we would think about the scene and go, okay, what height should the dividers be for this scene to work? And it was really fun in episode two watching Turturro like work the divider.
Totally. And the first time I saw him do that where he just understood how funny that was to like to be his own sort of like in and out of the scene.
And his timing with that was just amazing. Yeah.
And it's great for like punctuating a line in one way or the other they just really worked really well but the set itself becomes this like character throughout the whole series you know the set and the the props heli's weaponizing props patricia's throwing cups like the doors punctuating, like everything really worked with us as almost this set with a personality. Yeah.
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Okay, so we see Selvig in Mark's basement digging through a bin labeled Gemma's Crafts. She takes a red and green candle out of it for some reason.
And then while Cobell is in the bathroom, Petey escapes and she drives away and we see Petey start to walk by Mark's house. And then suddenly we see the hallway and this is kind of continuing that discussion of how you guys did this.
But I remember that. I remember you guys pulling up a piece of the hallway and putting it next to Mark's house out in that neighborhood.
Am I remembering that correctly? Yes, you are. So you can just seamlessly have him walk into that world.
Yeah. We wanted to have a real hallway there just to pan into out.
So we put that outside of the house and then went into the real hallways with him. And then we went on to this bridge in Kingston, New York.
And that was another, again, just sort of like the experimentation phase of figuring out how to show this reintegration and this disorienting reality. Okay, then we're back at Lumen.
And Irving is the one who suggests the field trip to Perpetuity Wing after Mark's struggling with Helly in the bathroom. Mark asks Cobell for permission to take the team on this field trip.
She doesn't really grant it. She plays some mind games, throws a coffee cup.
And then Mark and Helly have that scene. Sorry, Britt.
No, I just wanted to call back the Colbert. Like my favorite moment of this episode is when Colbert, she's just thrown a cup at you.
And then Mark's like, door open or closed. And she says, both.
Oh, yeah. That was Patricia improvising that.
Total improv line from Patricia. It ends up being so brilliant, right? Because is it the Innie or the Audi? Both? Like, it's, I don't know.
To me, that's genius. Yeah, it's great.
It's very confusing to Mark, that's for sure. Well, also, the whole scene, she's like super calm and, you know, just has it all and then she goes, I gonna throw a coffee cup yeah and then she does and that to me is the whole sort of cobell you know the the thing that's so dangerous about her is you just never know what she's gonna do and then mark tells everyone we're going on this uh field trip we're going to the perpetuity wing.
And so they set off on this four-person little journey into sort of the guts of the severed floor. Is that right? Yeah.
It feels like it's a little bit of a Wizard of Oz going out down the yellow brick road, venturing out of their safe space. I love the banter there and the sort of back and forth that's going on where we're learning more about the lore and the accepted realities of this world.
They run into O&D, right? Yeah. They see Bert and Felicia.
Yeah, we run into Claudia Robinson and Christopher Walken out in the hallway. And this is such a fun scene to watch.
I hadn't seen it in a long time. Just Zach in this scene just kills me.
And Britt, you in this scene is great because you're just standing there looking at all this like, what is happening? It's so weird. Why are these people, are they afraid of each other? Like, what is going on? I think it's like the first exciting thing that's happened in Helly's mind.
She's like, oh, she kind of has a morbid fascination with the coup. And, you know, she's like, all right, maybe this is exciting.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think also we're still, you know, the audience is still sort of seeing this through your eyes, too. Because, you know, Dylan is talking about it like this is like a scene from West Side Story or something.
These are like the sharks and the jets meeting up. And he's such a dick to Claudia Robinson's character.
To Felicia. He's like, what the fuck? Like, he's just so mean to them because he thinks they're bad guys.
He doesn't trust them. He doesn't trust them at all.
But we see that there's a spark between Burt and Irving. Yeah.
And then the perpetuity wing for me was just when I read that for the first time and talked to Dan about it, I love animatrons, animatronic things, all that sort of Disneyland, Pirates of the Caribbean, you know, Haunted Mansion characters. Yep.
And the idea of this sort of like hall of presidents. Of CEOs.
Yeah, yeah. It's the corporate, you know, a corporate museum on the grounds.
It was so much fun to dig into. I remember you telling me about it, Ben, telling me about, we're going to have these animatronic mannequins and, but then getting there and actually seeing it, we shot, I don't remember what the place was we shot.
Yeah. was a weird location we found a space in yonkers new york it's called the hudson river museum right and we found a museum space that had this 60s sort of brutalist cement architecture and an amazing staircase and And that was why we wanted to use that space but then to create the kier egan house the reproduction of kier egan's entire house sort of like the image in my mind was always the temple of dendur at the metropolitan museum of art where they have recreated you know they put back together the egyptian temple in this indoor space yeah but this is a victorian home so we actually found at the museum there besides having that great room with the staircase they also had this amazing victorian era house and so that room that you guys go into as you will remember it, it was actually outside, and that lawn is outside,

and the house is there, but everything else we sort of built around it.

Yeah, it's wild.

And at this point, also, Jeff Mann, who's a great production designer,

had come in and created that smile wall,

and the smile wall is all members of our crew smiling. He just went around and took pictures.
I don't think it was Bendo who took the pictures. Which is so funny because we actually never saw our crew's faces because we were all wearing masks.
Well, that's the irony, isn't it? Britt, you used to always say to me, when I'd be talking to you in a scene, remember you would always say, can you please take your mask off because it would help you to understand what I was wanting you to do? Well, we were all wearing those cones of shame. Like we were dogs out of surgery.
We had a mask and then also the cone in front of us. And I think you had that too.
We didn't actually have cones. No, they were the plastic barriers.
Yes, we had to wear those cones around our heads. They were these like plastic shields.
Yeah, they were like shields, but they weren't like, I know the dog cone thing. They were basically dog cones, okay? Okay, okay.
And so I remember- We also had leashes. We each had a person that walked us around.
That had nothing to do with the show, though. No, no, that was just because it was super fun.
Just Adam. But, yeah, you would come and give a direction, and it would be like, okay, but so you're just going to give a leash and this.
Got it? And I'd be like, Ben, I can't hear you. But also, you know, I think because you're an actor, you give so much, nonverbal in your like direction.
You know, I can just. So, yeah, I think it's because I'm not inarticulate.
No, no. I think you just, you know, you've the minute I could see your face, I could I could interpret your note better.
That's also Bendo coming out because Bendo is such a physical being. But do you remember also there were those air scrubbers? They were like noise canceling machines that were on incessantly when we weren't filming.
And I went a little crazy. Yeah, you did not like those.
I remember that. No, everybody went a little crazy.
Let's be honest. I mean, it was all the time with all of the the ppe and stuff and yeah and it was like most of the time i was on a walkie-talkie with like shield and mask and you know it's just like a whole new thing to have to be able to connect and then every time they'd say rolling that all the stuff would come off and then it would go right back on it it was a drag i mean mean, we were talking with Zach last episode, Britt, and talking about how the only time the actors got to talk to other people and see their faces was when camera was rolling.
Other than that, we were either alone in our dressing rooms or completely masked up with, like you said, the plastic thing in front of our faces. It was really weird.
Right. Right that's you know in a way it brought a lot of humanity to the actual acting part because it was yeah it was like the only time in like nine months that any of us had been you know close yeah close to other human beings yeah we uh we have a clip here of the Perpetuity Wing.

Yeah, this is interesting because this is where Irving is talking about the history of the Egan family.

And again, it's like a way to learn some of the lore and what the rules of this world are.

She was five CEOs ago.

They never had a woman before.

As she told her father at age seven, she was

going to be the first. Isn't that lovely? It's beautiful.
It almost makes me wish I remembered

my own childhood. It's an unnatural state for a person to have no history.
History makes us someone. Gives us a context.
A shape. But waking up on that table, I was shapeless.
But then, I learned that I work for a company that has been actively caring for mankind since 1866 brit kind of picking up on that the thing is usually when you get a character when you're playing a role the first thing you do is or some people do some people don't but you build out somewhat of a backstory, childhood, family, interests, like stuff like that. But that is just not an option with Helly or any of the innies.
Did that like absence of history or backstory or whatever you want to call it, was that challenging or was that fun? How did you handle that? I listened to a lot of music, a lot of Patti Smith. I went down like a YouTube rabbit hole of people escaping from court, like who were on trial.
Oh, yeah. Like prisoners who were just like at their court appearance and then just escape.
I watched a lot videos of of like animals that were trapped. And I watched a lot.
Actually, we exchanged a few of those, Ben, documentaries about amnesia. Right, right.
And there was a really interesting one called Tell Me Who I Am. Right.
On Netflix about these twins who one of them was in an accident and woke up with no memory of who

he was. And you just sort of see the nature versus nurture play out in that documentary.
And so, yeah, I guess it was sort of a physical approach as opposed to like writing an autobiography. But you also have these little cards that you make up, and you showed them to me.
They're almost like little kind of miniature Wes Anderson-style frames of sort of the actions of your character. Can you explain it? They're beautiful.
Yeah. I, you know, because we were filming out of order and we had all the scripts in advance,

um, character. Can you explain it? They're beautiful.
Yeah, I, you know, because we were filming out of order, and we had all the scripts in advance, I just had never done so much filming out of order before. So as a kind of visual tool for myself, I drew little pictures of Helly's journey, physically, like running through the halls, smashing through windows.
And so whatever episode that we were filming, I could be like, okay, I've already cut my arm here. I've already hit Adam in the head.
This is where I'm trying to escape in this moment. Yeah.
I think that's something people don't maybe know about when you're filming something that you are filming out of order most of the time. for an actor you have to kind of commit to a tone and a feeling and a level of whatever it is that might seem totally you know in the moment like well what's that but in the story when you see it in the movie or the show it will make sense but you have to kind of do that on your own yeah and i think it's it's hard to do because it is hard yeah so they are venturing through the replica of the egan home and irving sees the bingo card in mark's pocket should we explain what that yeah egan bingo is a game that uh pd and mark and dylan used to play to make fun of irving and mark now is not as into it because he's supposed to be the leader of the group, but they all have this bingo card.
And they're marking off lame things that Irving says throughout the day. Mark has it in his pocket.
Irving spots it, pulls it out, and they start kind of going at each other a little bit. I'm sorry.
Can I just, I just want to say my other favorite moment in the episode is when Mark tries to sit on the bed and then gets caught. That's right.
He's like a kid with his hand in like a candy jar getting caught. Again, that's direct Helly influence because there's like this little like barrier between where you're standing in this stupid bed.
And all he does is put his foot on the other side of this seven-inch barrier. And Irving immediately catches him.
Yeah. And also, by the way, why are you not allowed to sit on the bed? Because it's a replica of Curie's house, not even the real house.
And no one's there. There's no one there.
It's so ridiculous. Just fourth graders on a field trip.
That's right. That's right.
So while they're doing this and Dylan's in the room with them, kind of distracted by them, Heldie makes a run for it. And she has taken her bingo card and her pencil that she has and written on a piece of paper, never come back here.
And she is hauling ass through the severed floor and Mark is chasing her and she is headed for the exit that she kind of burst out of in episode one, I believe. Yeah.
The full-on running through the hallways for Britt. Yeah, this is our first real run through the hallways.
First of many. Yeah, Helly, I think at this point, still thinks if she can get a message out to her Audi, then obviously she'll see that this is unethical and she's being held here against her will.
So she's just trying to get the note through the door in order to get her head out enough to see and read the note. Yeah.
Yeah. I just want to say our camera operators are like, again, another extension of the characters on the show.
Like the way they move with us, especially in the hallways. It's like we're all on like a basketball team together.
They're incredible. That's interesting, Britt, because didn't you play basketball in high school? I did play basketball.
I really felt like even wearing heels, I felt like there was a basketball quality to Helly season one. And you love basketball.
I do. The Knicks are playing right now as we record this, but this is how dedicated I am to the show.
How are you handling this right now? I'm severed from the basketball game right now. Your innie will be watching basketball later.
Did you know that me and John Turturro and Zach Cherry are huge Liberty fans? I love that. We saw a game together.
I saw you guys at the world champion Liberty. Yeah, in the finals.
Yeah, in the finals. So Grainer shows up, and this time Mark is like taker.
Like last time he stepped in front of her and went to the break room in her stead.

This time he lets her go.

So Heli enters the break room, finds Milchik there waiting for her, and he makes her read something called the compunction statement.

And we actually have a clip of that.

I'm bringing up the compunction statement for Helly R.

What is this?

Read it.

I don't want to.

No. Do.
Forgive me for the harm I have caused this world. None may atone for my actions but me, and only in me shall their stain live on.
I am thankful to have been caught, my fall cut short by those with wizened hands. All I can be is sorry, and that is all I am.
I'm afraid you don't mean it. Excuse me? Again, please.
Do you want to talk about what that was like, Britt, shooting that stuff in the break room? Well, that room was pretty frightening to be in. And, like, watching it back, it's a pretty disturbing scene.
Yeah. You know, you're watching a person realize they have no free will and she's realizing she's there to be broken down.
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I remember the projector being in my face.
It was just sort of physically uncomfortable, but I thought Tramiel did such an incredible job of grounding that scene. And you guys added the shot of Patricia.
Yeah, there's a shot where she sort of just appears. It's almost like an apparition, but she's there watching.
I mean, it is disturbing. You do such a good job in that scene.
And I can imagine it was not easy. Yeah, it must have had a similar effect on you as it does the character, just having to sit there all day reading that one statement.
It's just insane. But I think, you know, that's the kind of meta part of our show, right? Our job as actors is to split ourselves into selves.
And anytime I was filming a sequence that was like a little frightening, I just just like did simple things like remind myself in the morning that I was putting on a character's clothing. and that at the of the day like I'm putting on Brit's clothing just to like help my again you know we're talking about how trauma is stored in the body and just reminding my body like oh this is real and this isn't real yeah I feel like you have such a respect for the character you're playing working Working with you over these years, you've always, you know, looked out for Helly.
Totally. Yeah.
I mean, I'm really drawn to her. There's like an archetypical energy about all of these characters, right? And to be able to step into a character like Helly, who is just such a fighter for justice,

you know, initially for her own,

to fight for her own freedom and autonomy.

And then as the season goes on,

she really starts to fight for the rest of the MDR as well

because she feels like, you know, they're her family.

Yeah.

It didn't fit you.

There wasn't any like weird meta thing

where like I'd be saying like,

do it again, take 12, take 13, take 14. Right.
No, no, no. Not at all.
Okay, good. It wasn't like...
No, not at all. I just meant on a macro scale, like we go to work and we put on different clothes and assume a different identity.
But yeah, no, it's a completely warm and loving environment to be working in. Sorry.
Adam likes to do a lot of takes. I do.
Do you like to do a lot of takes, Britt? Yeah, sometimes. I mean, it's a very technical show at times, right? So we have to do a lot of different angles.
And I've come to really enjoy working with, again, the camera crew. And, you know, we had all those Libra heads in season one that were like these robots that we were working with that were being operated by someone else in a room.
Yeah, Libra heads, which are the remote camera heads, which because of, they're used a lot, but especially with the pandemic, it allowed the camera operator to be operating the camera remotely far away. And so the camera's just sort of on this kind of of robot head as brit was saying and and so you're having to deal with that a lot but i kind of loved that right because it's i did too it's like the camera is like dollying down the hallway then it's making a turn and then doing a 360 degree turn and then someone's pulling focus on your eye and then you say your line you know know, like that's so fun.
I thought it was sometimes great to have that because sometimes people are distracting. And when you're in there just sort of by yourself with a camera, for whatever reason, sometimes it took inhibitions away from me.
And then sometimes it felt lonely and weird. I guess it just depended on what we were doing.
Yeah. That's one of my favorite things when you're shooting a comedy.
If you're doing a scene and you're like cracking up, you know that thing sometimes when you would lose it, and then you're like, and then you really lose it and you can't do it again. You keep it going like, now you're just laughing because you're laughing.
I could always cure that by then looking at the grip who was just looking at his phone waiting to go home and it just yeah just wants to go home um by the way brit it just you and tramell in that scene are great and your friendship with tramell you guys are it seems to me like you guys have a very special relationship and did that come out of working on the show

together and what is it like working with him well tramell's the best he's so thoughtful he's he has such a depth and empathy and um he's he's kind of i think he's a genius really uh His portrayal of Milchick is so layered.

And yeah, I think the Milchick is so layered.

And yeah, I think the whole cast, we got so close, you know, over the course of like living through a pandemic together.

And then the strikes happened.

And a lot of us, you know, got closer by being on the picket lines together.

It's such a warm and wonderful cast.

Everyone's obsessed with making this show. Yeah.
a great great group of people ben do you want to talk at all as far as the break room goes about the lighting and the design of it yeah jeremy created these weird off-angle walls uh it's just ridiculous strange angles for the for the walls yeah it's almost like it small too, right? It's pretty small and it almost feels like, I don't know why the walls are like that, but we had that sort of cottage cheese, the perforated panels that to me are just like the most depressing thing ever. It almost feels like from another era or from like a sound studio in the 50s or something right um and then we just kept it very very dark and really that table was cat miller's design our props genius i also think um yeah speaking of genius yeah and she had to figure out a table that could do this sort of old-school acetate projector, which is that projector that he slips the slide into that has the writing on it, which goes back to my era as a kid in grade school of how they would, you know.
The overhead projector. Yeah, the overhead projector thing.
And then finding all this great old-school, you know, cassette deck, mini cassette deck, almost like a lie detector vibe happening. And I love all the details of that scene too, that she made in terms of like

the Lumen first aid stuff. And then it's really ultimately, it comes down to the actors always.

And it's just the tone in that scene. And I think you're right.
Tramiel has this amazing facility to

be still and to hold a moment and

Mm-hmm. tone in that scene and i think you're right tramell has this amazing facility to be still and to hold a moment and on the surface it seems like he's not doing anything but there's so much going on and that's just a quality that he has and i think it's the work that he does for his character's inner life that you know is all there but he feels no need to have to show it it's just he trusts it's there yeah tramell is a force yeah it's just unbelievable and he's a great runner too some good oh yeah hallway running scenes and an incredible dancer oh my god get to that we'll get to that later in the season oh come on you know i i just want to say we haven't touched on how incredible Adam's hair is compared to how rebellious my hair often is, Ben.
Don't get me started about Adam's hair. Do you want to comment on? I think you want to talk about it.
It feels to me like you want to talk about my hair obsessions. And I don't know if this is the forum to talk about it.
We might need a separate podcast. I think this is the exact forum to talk about it.
Oh, you think we may need a separate podcast for the hair obsessions? I didn't even have hair until I was five years old. You're a bald person? Yeah, my mom used to have to put like a Velcro bow on my head.

I just saw the pull quote for this episode in the press.

Me too.

It's going to get picked up everywhere.

This episode is sponsored by Baby Propecia.

Is that, that's, were people wondering what was going on?

With my hair? Yeah.

No, I just was a late bloomer.

But when it did grow out, it just,'t want to do anything it's told to do. And so we often, I feel like at the end of the day, Adam, you and I would just mess our hair up in a rebellion.
Yeah, I will just say Adam's hair is something that needs to be addressed because it's incredible. And I am both obsessed, envious, amazed, appreciative.
And your hair, Britt, is amazing too. And I know that the look that you came up with for your hair on the show with your costumes by Sarah Edwards is very, I think, iconic because it's sleek, cool, and of a time but not of a time.
And I did pop in every once in a while to just make sure the hair would be in the right place. Adjust a hair or two, a flyaway.
Yeah, that's okay. I just also want to say, can you imagine if Helly had been a brunette? No.
We almost did that. We did? Yeah.
Remember you called me and you were like, I think we got to go brown. And then you called me like a couple days later and you were like, I think, I think we got to go brown.
And then you called me like a couple of days later and you were like, I'm sorry. I changed my mind.
It's got to be red.

Oh my god

Well the red hair goes so perfectly

With the wardrobe

With Sarah Edwards

Do you guys just really quickly

Because again this is like a Halloween costume now

Can you talk about the wardrobe

And the building of that with Sarah Edwards, who I'm sure we'll have on at some point? Yeah, I was just talking to Sarah about this actually, because I wanted to get the details right. But the sweaters that I wear on the show are knit by a company, like they're hand knit and dyed so that they're a specific color that will match whatever blue that Ben wants because Ben loves blue.
And the A-line skirts are all made on site and they're tailored so that I can move in them, especially, you know, when we were developing the character, I was like, she's on the move all the time. I think we really started with the shoes, like trying to figure out how I could be running through hallways.
And Sarah found these ballroom dancing shoes from Italy. Yeah, I think anybody can make something complicated, but I think it takes a genius to make something and that's where sarah edward really shines in her costume design is that she you know there's a like this elegance and simplicity to all the costumes and then of course brit it's also the way that you wear the clothes and your walk because the the heli walk is as identifiable as any any walk I think it's like Denzel Washington does a walk and then there's the Brit Lauer heli walk.
I didn't even know this was a thing. When I see Denzel doing his thing, there's a walk, that swagger that he has in certain characters that's a very specific thing.
And I feel like you have your own version of that as heli that is very forward-moving, leaning in, and self-assured. And it's just like you could identify it.
Wow. It's true.
It's totally true. Helly is like taking over the space she's in when she's walking around.
I'm very honored to be in a category with Denzel. Okay, we're at the end of the episode and Petey is in a convenience store at a gas station yelling about needing tokens.
So he's sort of feeling like he's at MDR needing tokens for the snack machine. Mark arrives home to discover Petey's not there.
So he hops in his car to go looking for him, sees some ambulances, decides to follow them. He lands at the convenience store and sees Petey being brought out with some EMTs and they make eye contact.
And at that moment, Petey just sort of collapses to the ground. Mark gets freaked out and a little paranoid and takes off.
And we're left not knowing exactly what Petey's fate is here, but it's not good. Yeah, yeah.
And Mark runs home, goes to the basement, hides any evidence that Petey was ever there. That was also always interesting to me that Mark had this sort of guilty streak in him.
Yeah. One thing I remember being really important is writing that line of Mark believing or not believing all this stuff that Petey's been saying to him.
And no one would believe all of it. It's just too crazy.
But it is all sort of piecing together a little bit. So it's starting to form in his head that there might be something there.
And then he sees him maybe drop dead at the convenience store. He's not sure what exactly is happening, but decides to cover his tracks a bit here just in case.
And then that phone rings if we don't know who it is or what it is. That's right.
End of episode. Yeah.
The cell phone that Petey ostensibly left behind right well brit thank you can't thank you enough for doing this it's so fun yeah so much fun brit oh well you know i'm not mad about the daylight savings anymore so but just curiously are you into day you you you're anti-daylight savings time oh my god i'm just curious I have absolutely no opinion on it whatsoever. See, that's the problem, is most people have no opinion.
Okay. All right.
The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott is a presentation of Odyssey, Pineapple Street Studios, Red Hour Productions, and Great Scott Productions. If you like the show, be sure to rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcasts the Odyssey app or your other podcast platform of choice Our executive producers are Barry Finkel Henry Malofsky Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis The show is produced by Zandra Ellen and Naomi Scott This episode was mixed and mastered by Chris Basil.
We have additional

engineering from Javi Crucis and Davey Sumner. Show clips are courtesy of Fifth Season.
Music by Theodore Shapiro. Special thanks to the team at Odyssey, Maura Curran, Eric Donnelly, Michael LeVay, Melissa Wester, Matt Casey, Kate Rose, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.
And the team at Red Hour,

John Lesher, Carolina Pesikov,

Jean-Pablo Antonetti,

Martin Valderutin, Ashwin Ramesh,

Maria Noto, John Baker,

and Oliver Ager.

And at Great Scott, Kevin Cotter,

Josh Martin, and Christy Smith

at Rise Management.

We also had additional production help from

Gabrielle Lewis, Ben Goldberg,

Stephen Key,

Kristen Torres,

Emmanuel Hapsis,

Mari Alexa Cavanaugh,

and Melissa Slaughter.

I'm Adam Scott.

I'm Ben Stiller.

And we will see you next time. Thank you.
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