Patricia Arquette on ‘Severance’ and David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’: I ‘Met My Own Shadow’
After nearly three years, “Severance”, one of 2022’s most celebrated shows, is finally returning. The critically acclaimed series, which explores the sci-fi extremes of work-life balance, begins its ten-episode second season on January 17. Patricia Arquette, who earned an Emmy nomination for her role as the calculating Harmony Cobel, returns to play the office manager who stalks her employees outside of the company. As the air date approaches, Arquette is excited, but reluctant to open up too much about what lies in store. “I don’t really carry characters with me, or I try very hard not to, but ‘Severance’ is different,” she told IndieWire.
“Whenever people ask me about playing Harmony Cobel or ‘Severance,’ this little thing comes into my mind and I just want to lie to them,” she said with a wry smile. “So, whatever I say, I wouldn’t count on it.”
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One thing fans of the series can count on is that the second season production had a very different atmosphere from the first. “When we shot [season one], it was during Covid before there were vaccines or anything,” Arquette said. “We wore plastic face shields and masks, and we were all separated. You couldn’t joke with anyone so there was this kind of weird dystopian separation thing happening. At the time I was thinking, ‘I don’t think anyone’s gonna want to watch this thing right now.’ I was very happily surprised when it connected with so many people.”
Anticipation for its second season has been tortuously drawn out for fans. SZA spoke for many when she tweeted last May that she would like Season 2 “right the fuck now”, prompting Stiller to respond, “oh ok got it”. Several months later, before the release of the first eight minutes, an official synopsis of the new season promised employees were “learning the dire consequences of trifling with the severance barrier, leading them further down a path of woe.”
For Arquette, the concept of a divided self goes well beyond the workplace. “I think there’s a lot of people that are severed all around us,” she said. “People having affairs are severed, people who are criminals and liars and even normal people can be severed in many, many ways. So I think that’s an interesting thing to look at. Maybe that resonates for a lot of people.”
It is a concept that certainly resonates with her. Born in Chicago, Arquette was the daughter of actress and dancer Mardi Nowak and actor Lewis Arquette, best known for playing a mercurial manager J. D. Pickett in the television series “The Waltons”. Mardi’s temper and Lewis’s alcoholism meant that home life was turbulent and often abusive for her and her siblings. By the time she was 17, Arquette’s sister Alexis had made her screen debut in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”, younger brother David was making moves toward his own career as an actor, and older sister Rosanna had starred alongside Madonna in the film “Desperately Seeking Susan,” and in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.”
“For me, it was actually an organised effort to become brave enough to act,” Arquette said. “Although I was a little bit spunky, I was also very shy. I’ve struggled with codependence in my life and trying to appease other people. Some people can be very assertive, I don’t have that kind of bravery. I feel like it’s an ongoing effort to discover what I want.”
Arquette began both her television and film career in 1987 with a memorable appearance in “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and “Daddy,” a television movie since used in high school health classes to educate about the dangers of teen pregnancy.
“When I was 18, I graduated high school and I didn’t know if I wanted to be an actor or a midwife,” she said. “I looked at that choice and I said to myself, ‘more than being an actor or midwife, I want to be brave. I’m going to choose trying to be an actor so that I can experience failure and rejection and I can continue to try and show up and push through.’ I gave myself a year. Every day I would study a movie, I would take a class or I would go to an audition. Sometimes I got horrible responses, literally the worst feedback you could ever get, like, ‘this is the worst actor we’ve ever seen. Why did you send her to us?’ But, I actually got work. Because of my drive to fail, my drive to be brave, I started to get jobs.”
By 1990, she was appearing in guest roles in the television series’ “Thirtysomething” and “Tales from the Crypt”before starring in the decade-defining films “True Romance,” “Ed Wood,” and “Flirting With Disaster.”
Of her performances during the 1990s, few have endured more than her dual role in David Lynch’s 1997 film“Lost Highway”. Arquette has spoken about the difficulties she faced playing Renee, the suspicious wife of Bill Pullman’s saxophone player Fred Madison, and Alice Wakefield, wife of gangster Mr Eddy and femme fatale to the young man that Pullman’s character transforms into partway through the film, after Fred is jailed for Renee’s murder.
In a review typical of many at the time, Roger Ebert wrote of Arquette’s roles, “we don’t feel it’s a surrealistic joke. We feel – I dunno, I guess I felt jerked around.” Ebert also expressed discomfort at the scene in which Alice is forced to disrobe at gunpoint, a scene she herself struggled to shoot. Despite its Trent Reznor-produced soundtrack album charting in the Top 10, and positive reviews for Arquette’s performances, “Lost Highway” was a box office disappointment. As with many films that deepen with repeat viewings and fail to offer easy resolutions, Lynch’s film has undergone a critical reappraisal, something Arquette is thrilled to discover.
“Really?” she said, eyes widening with surprise. “I’m so glad to hear it’s getting appreciated because I think it’s a really, really interesting movie.” Unprompted, she recalls her experiences on set. “As an actress, David doesn’t give you a lot of information. So I’d say, ‘David, am I playing two people? Is this one a ghost?’ And he’d say,” she adopts Lynch’s voice: ‘What do you think, Patrish?’” she smiles. “So, I had to make up my own logic. I decided we’re looking at women through the eyes of a misogynist, but one who is woke enough to know he shouldn’t think this way. It’s almost become a subconscious part of him,” she widens her eyes before launching into her interpretation of the film that has puzzled so many viewers.
“When he kills her, he can’t reconcile that in his mind, so he reimagines himself as this regular guy, an innocent young mechanic,” she said. “But then he meets her again, and she wants him, and now they’re in love. But even then, to him, she’s a whore. Because in the mind of a misogynist, a narcissist, you will always become a monster.”
When Lynch explained that “Lost Highway” was inspired by the televised trial of O.J. Simpson, many wrote the observation off as more weirdness from the “Twin Peaks” creator who frustrated millions of Americans by refusing to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer before disappointing them by doing exactly that. For Arquette, the parallels are clear.
“David wrote “Lost Highway” during the O.J. Simpson trial. If you were watching it live, at a certain point you saw O.J. begin to believe his own lie,” she slows her speech, remembering. “You started to see him almost… imagining it all away. Like, ‘what an innocent I am.’ It was very strange to observe. I feel like there’s a lot of elements of that in this movie.”
As she speaks about her memories of “Lost Highway”, Arquette notes the similarities between the “innies” and “outies” of “Severance”, and her roles as Renee and Alice. Besides the challenges posed by Covid, Arquette’s experiences working with the cast and crew of the Apple TV+ series have been positive. Working on Lynch’s set required a level of bravery that the shy girl from Chicago had not drawn on before.
“That was the hardest movie for me to ever make because I’ve always been very shy,” she said carefully. “Especially sexually. I think I probably had a lot of trauma. Even when I was little, I would never want anyone to look at me naked. For many years, I would even take baths in the dark, alone with just a candle. For me, making “Lost Highway”was one of the bravest things I could have done. I was so sick of carrying this burden of terror, this fear,” she says, her voice rising from a near whisper. “That was a very powerful movie for me to make. I kind of met my own shadow.”
“Severance” Season 2 premieres on Apple TV+ January 17.
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