Ben Stiller Details Why Fans Had to Wait So Long for ‘Severance’ Season 2
Ben Stiller knows that “Severance” Season 2 has taken much longer than fans hoped. Turns out, production began way back in 2022, but the world of Innies and Outies was put on pause due to a series of external factors.
Stiller, who directs five episodes of the second season and serves as an executive producer, told Vanity Fair that a majority of the season was completed before the strikes in 2023. Now, “Severance” Season 2 premieres January 17, 2025.
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“It took a while to write Season 2,” Stiller said. “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 seven of our 10 episodes, and then we had to regroup after the strike.”
Stiller continued, “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.”
“Severance” centers on Lumon employees, led by Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), Helly (Britt Lower), and Irving (John Turturro), who are trying to piece together what it is exactly they are asked to do all day. Patricia Arquette, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Michael Chernus, Dichen Lachman, Christopher Walken, and Sarah Bock co-star. Season 2 is about the cast of characters “learning the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe,” according to the official synopsis.
Gwendoline Christie, Alia Shawkat, Bob Balaban, and more actors are joining the cast for Season 2, as announced in April 2022.
The fandom of “Severance” has also added more pressure for the series to deliver on its twists and turns, according to Stiller.
“I’m excited that we finally are at this place,” Stiller said of the series returning. “It’s an interesting process making something like this second season because you now know there’s an audience there that cares. That has been in our minds the entire time, ‘Wow, people really are paying attention to these details.’”
He continued, “When [Season 1] came out, it was fun to look at all of the reactions and how people would kind of dig into theories. We wanted to pick up the story where it left off. We’re bringing the Innies to the Outie world and then will answer some questions by the end of the season. Hopefully we keep it enough of a mystery and intriguing enough that people want to keep following the story. […] My hope is that, when they see this season, there’s an awareness that we’re trying to connect some dots and also leave some dots unconnected and put out some new dots to connect.”
Series creator and writer Dan Erickson echoed just how “intricate” Season 2 is.
“We do shoot pretty methodically, and we probably don’t turn around as many pages of script per day as a lot of other shows,” Erickson said. “That comes down to just trying to make sure that we get it right.”
Erickson added, “On a practical level, it’s a very intricate show. Each character has two lives — essentially, two personalities — and we are expanding. 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.”
That included asking Apple to scrap certain sets, too.
“[We had] 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,’” Erickson said. “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.”
Erickson also teased what fans can look forward to with Season 2, and hinted that actress Arquette was correct in previously warning audiences to be “very scared” about the story arc.
“I think things get darker,” Erickson said. “We very much wanted to put our heroes in a scarier place because season one ends with them poking the bear. They form this little rebellion, and they’re able to achieve a modicum of success with it, but the question with season two was: What happens when the bear pokes back? What’s the fallout of this victory that they had? I think, without giving much away, the fallout is dire.”
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