Warning: This will delve into spoilers for Severance.With the Apple TV Plus series Severance being the surprise TV hit of 2022, the cast was bound to be asked questions about what it was like to be on the show. Recently, one question that came up was about what it was like to play two characters in the same person, a question that pertained to only a couple of actors in the show.
Britt Lower, who plays Helena/Helly Riggs, and Adam Scott, who plays Mark Scout, reflected on what it was like to play two different people who were basically different versions of the same character in the Apple TV Plus show, with their "innie" and their "outie." Lower used psychological terms to describe her approach to the role.
"I sort of thought of it as the duality of a single person, so the ego versus the id," Lower said in a recent interview with BuzzFeed. She then detailed the difference between the two characters. "The 'innie' is kind of this raw material that hasn't been affected by years of memories and the stories that we tell ourselves, and my outie is much more seen in a presentational scenario, so she's much more aware of people looking at her, whereas "innie" Helly doesn't really care what anyone thinks," she said. Scott recalled actor Michael Keaton's approach to the film Multiplicity, as director Ben Stiller told him, for inspiration when portraying Mark. "Seeing that (Keaton) had like a whiteboard with charts because he played seven different versions of the same character in that movie. So he had a chart with a diagram of where each version of the character was at a different point in the story."
The audience only got Helly's "outie" in tidbits, which included the massive twist that she was the daughter of Lumon Industries' CEO. However, they got fully exposed to Mark's "innie" and "outie" throughout Severence to demonstrate both of them growing more and more skeptical of the company they work for and what their lives were like on the other side. In the process, they exposed Lumon's torturous ways of handling employees, that the severance procedure is not foolproof, and, most shocking of all, that Mark's presumed dead wife has apparently been alive the whole time.
Severance's exciting first season ended with Mark's "innie" exposing that his wife was not dead after all and Helly exposing Lumon Industries' corruption before both were switched back to their outies. With all of that out in the open, it leaves so many questions. How is Lumon going to respond to what could be a PR disaster in the making? If Mark's wife has been alive the whole time, what does Lumon want from him, and did they have something to do with his wife's death hoax to begin with? Will the "innies" ever get another chance to see what their lives are truly like on the outside?
That pretty much epitomizes the appeal of Severance. From the very beginning, you have questions, but once those questions are answered, that only leads to more questions, but not to the point where viewers get frustrated. What makes the show so appealing is how left in the dark the viewers are, and yet, enough comes to light that they want to know more. It's not one of those shows where it's clear that not even the writers know what's going on and are putting it all off to buy time. Because Severance season 1 leaves so many loose ends, fans should be optimistic that the second season will only capitalize on a captivating first season.
Severance can currently be streamed on Apple TV Plus.
Source: BuzzFeed Celeb/Youtube