Finally, the wait is over. After three long years, “Severance” season 2 is finally here, with the first episode debuting on Apple TV Plus last night. The premiere takes no time launching us back into the high-stakes environment of Lumon’s Severed Floor, and star Adam Scott says he channeled his inner Tom Cruise for the opening scene’s pulse-pounding dash.
As we saw in the season 2 teaser trailer, the latest season kicks off with Mark (Scott) sprinting through Lumon’s eerily white halls looking for the wellness center after the troubling revelation he had at the end of season 1. For almost two minutes, he darts around like a rat in a maze as the camera’s shifting angles build a sense of panic. As for the actual cardio element, while Scott has said he didn’t do any particular training to get in shape for the scene, he did take cues from the “Mission: Impossible” star as his running inspiration.
“I trained by watching Tom Cruise and what he does,” Scott said in a recent interview with Rotten Tomatoes posted on Threads. “Ben [Stiller] and I talked about Tom Cruise quite a bit when shooting that stuff because he is the very best at running in clothing that should not be run in, and I was in a suit the whole time.”
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“Adam had to run a lot this season,” quipped Stiller, an executive producer on the show. Scott even picked up on a certain tell on set that clued him into when to expect more hallway sprinting: “I always knew another portion of the running scene was coming when I was asked what color of Gatorade I wanted in three days.”
The showrunners revealed even more behind-the-scenes info on the January 17 episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller & Adam Scott. Stiller said he was excited to do another long hallway sequence as a “nice mirror” to the Severed Floor intro scene we saw in season 1, and it was a “great collaboration” between cinematographer Jessica Lee Gangé, production designer Jeremy Hendel, and the visual effects team. The opening scene of season 2’s “Hello, Ms. Cobel” alone took four to five months to film, mostly due to headaches with scheduling, Stiller explained.
“I think there are about 10 different pieces in it. …Each [piece] had a different need in terms of what had to be done with the set. There was one where we had to do it completely with green screen and have you on a treadmill and have a motion control camera come around in front of you and do all this stuff,” Stiller said on the podcast.
“And then there was one — we had pulled one of the walls out and we’re using this machine called a bolt arm. It’s a motion control robot arm that the camera is on, that you can program, and it moves. That thing takes up a lot of space. So our normal layout of all the hallways had to get torn up. And when you’re doing that, you can’t shoot other scenes in the hallways. So we had to schedule it at times when you guys would be shooting a scene in a different set…”
It all comes together in a visual masterpiece that the “Severance” team deserves one hell of a pat on the back for. Be sure to check out our “Severance” season 2 episode 1 recap as well as our guide on how to watch “Severance” season 2 online.
