Ben Stiller & Dan Erickson Explain ‘Severance’ Season 2 Delays: “It’s Worth It”
Nearly two years after the show debuted, the wait for Severance‘s return is nearly over.
With Season 2 of the 7x Emmy-nominated Apple TV+ sci-fi series premiering Jan. 17, creator Dan Erickson and EP/director Ben Stiller explained that the Hollywood strikes were only partially to blame for the delays.
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“It took a while to write season two,” Stiller recently told Vanity Fair. “Then we started to shoot in October of 2022, and we got shut down by the strike in May [2023]. At that point, we had completed about 7 of our 10 episodes, and then we had to regroup after the strike. It takes us a while to prep the show. And so, we didn’t start shooting until January [2024]. Then we shot from January to May to finish the last three episodes.”
As Erickson explained, Severance is “a very intricate show” with many of its characters living double lives, thanks to the show’s fictional technology that allows corporate employees to surgically divide their memories of their work and personal lives.
“Each character has two lives—essentially, two personalities—and we are expanding,” he said. “For me, the writing was the most painstaking part of the process because there were so many ways we could go. And sometimes we would come up with something that worked perfectly well on paper, and then it wouldn’t be until we got there and we’re shooting it that we realize: This isn’t quite it. We were never willing to let that turn it into something that wasn’t perfect.”
Their commitment to perfection resulted in more than just rewrites, with parts of production already happening when they decided to return to the drawing board.
Erickson noted there were “entire locations that we were planning to go to. We had already built or partially built them when we realized, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’ Those aren’t always fun calls to have with the studio, where you’re like, ‘Hey, you know that thing you put a lot of resources into? Well, we’re not going to do it now, or we’re going to do something that’s totally different.’ But again, at the end of the day, it’s worth it.”
In the 10-episode Season 2, Mark (Adam Scott) and his friends learn the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.
In addition to Scott, Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, Jen Tullock, Michael Chernus, Dichen Lachman, John Turturro, Christopher Walken, Patricia Arquette and new series regular Sarah Bock also star.
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