Ben Stiller and Adam Scott cover last week’s Variety, in a profile that journalist Ethan Shanfeld calls a “victory lap” for this second season of Severance. It’s less a Q&A and more of a profile of how this weird and wildly popular show came about and how it’s enhanced both actors’ careers and visibility. Stiller has long been famous but Scott has been in character actor terrain until Severance. Scott gets recognized so much more thanks to this show. I learned about the show’s creator, Dan Erickson, who has just one credit before Severance and blew Stiller and later Scott away with his script. There’s a lot that goes into Severance, and while Stiller won’t get into many details about season three, it’s in the works now. They’re also considering spinoffs and have some ideas, but it sounds like they’re going to take a while.
How many episodes have been written for Season 3? (Long pause.) “I don’t want to talk about where we’re at in our process.” How many seasons will you make in total? (Small grin.) “No comment.” Will John Turturro be back? (Big grin.) “No comment.”
Do you see “Severance” as a franchise with spinoff shows? Stiller speaks slowly: “There are two specific ideas — that I won’t tell you — that we’ve talked about internally as possible spinoff ideas.” Asked what stage of development the spinoff ideas are in, or whether they have been discussed with Apple, all Stiller says, with a coy smile, is: “They are nascent.”
As for other extensions of the show, Stiller says it’d “be great to have a ‘Severance’ video game.” Scott agrees: “I think it lends itself to one.” And, at some point, they want to make merchandise like Lumon keyboards, as long as it feels “bespoke and specific to the show.”
Is “Severance” the definitive project of your careers? “Ever since I read the script, I knew this is what I’ve been working toward this whole time,” says Scott. “For 25 years, I had been marching my way through the sludge to get to a place where maybe I could get a role like this. It feels like a culmination for me.”
Stiller concurs: “To have this experience at this point in my career — after having been doing it for a long time — I never want to take it for granted.”
Severance is not my favorite show and it has flaws, but I’m attached to it and I care what happens to most of the core characters. There are characters I’m not interested in, particularly the goat people, but they serve a purpose. Many of you liked that group, led by Gwendoline Christie’s character, but it didn’t fit for me. The marching band seemed out of left field too, but I would love to see a spinoff with their backstory. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) is one of my favorites and I’d like a whole series with him, but I’ll take a capsule episode, similar to Mrs. Selvig’s (Patricia Arquette’s) backstory on that bleak island. More than that, though, I want to know about Burt’s (Christopher Walken’s) mysterious past with Lumon. Was he a hit man and do Burt and Irving (John Turturro) reunite?
In a part of the piece I didn’t excerpt, Stiller was asked about a Puck News piece from 2023 that detailed infighting during season two production between original scriptwriter Dan Erickson and co-writer Mark Friedman (Wayward Pines, Dispatches from Elsewhere) and a “toxic environment.” Stiller talked around it, saying “Stuff that happens behind the scenes should happen behind the scenes. Everybody on the show gets along.” Notice he’s seemingly talking about the actors, not the writers. I went through the individual episodes on IMDB to see the credited writers and counted 12 writers other than Erickson and Friedman, with some names only appearing once in season one.
As for a Severance video game, I really hope it includes that weird Lumon numbers game, microdata refinement, the employees play. I found fan-created versions including this one that I played for a few minutes. It seemed pretty random and I doubt I couldn’t figure out if I was finding patterns but it was satisfying.
Photos credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon, Backgrid, Getty and via Instagram/Variety
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