Ben Stiller on Severance Season 3, Spinoffs and Cut Characters

When the second season of “Severance” premiered, and the workplace puzzle box quickly became the buzziest show on television, Adam Scott was in the Irish countryside filming an indie horror movie. When he got back to the states, everything had changed.

“It’s certainly different walking down the street,” says Scott, who plays the split-brained Mark Scout on the Apple TV+ series. “Every 10 steps, someone has to talk about the show. People are yelling at me from their cars. And in a bakery, there was a cookie with my face on it.”

We’re on the patio of an Italian restaurant, drinking double espressos with Ben Stiller as the late-afternoon sun bakes the asphalt on 10th Avenue. I can’t tell if either of them is aware that every few minutes, a passerby almost breaks their neck to catch a glimpse of them.

“Whatever recognizability I’ve had over the years was a steady climb, so I’m used to a certain amount of getting stopped by people,” says Scott. He became a star as Amy Poehler’s love interest on “Parks and Recreation,” led the cult favorite “Party Down” and had memorable roles in “Big Little Lies” and “Step Brothers.” He drapes one leg over the other. “But this is new.”

A month after the holy-fucking-shit finale of Season 2, the star and the director of “Severance” sit down for what I can only assume is one of the last stops on their impressive, six-month global press tour. It’s starting to look more like a victory lap. When I interviewed both of them in December before the premiere, Scott and Stiller were focused on rallying those who watched Season 1 to tune back in for Season 2. Now, the show is bigger than either of them could have imagined: What started as a niche sci-fi hit with awards and critical acclaim has become a cultural juggernaut. Terms like “innie” and “outie” have permeated office vocabulary. Its characters and their cubicles took over Grand Central Station — and the internet — for two days. And its theme song was performed for some 50,000 people at Coachella.

“For me, it’s when the organ player at Madison Square Garden plays it during Knicks games,” says Stiller. “Like I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Stiller first read the pilot for “Severance” nearly a decade ago. Written by Hollywood outsider Dan Erickson, the script followed the grief-stricken Mark Scout, who undergoes a procedure that completely “severs” his home life from his work life, creating two consciousnesses separated by an office elevator. As Mark and his co-workers at Lumon Industries discover cracks in the shady biotech company’s carefully crafted veneer, dark truths are revealed. “It reminded me of so many things that I loved in terms of workplace comedies,” Stiller says. “But then there was that other weird, eerie thing.”

It was wholly original, and Stiller was impelled to bring Lumon to life. Both he and Erickson had independently thought of Scott for the lead role, so, in 2017, Stiller gave him a call. It was a few days after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration and Scott was at Sundance, knee-deep in snow, when he answered the phone.

“Ben gave me the quick rundown — for lack of a better term, the elevator pitch,” Scott says. “I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a year and a half until I read the script.”

Pitching the show was the hard part. “Nobody wanted it except Apple, which didn’t even exist yet as a streamer,” says Stiller. “It was a little bit like, ‘Oh great, the computer company!’ It didn’t even seem real.” (Now, Stiller says with confidence that Apple is “the best place” for “Severance,” and not only because of the “meta levels” of it being a massive global tech company. “Thank goodness we didn’t end up at, like, Showtime or something.”)

Despite having never worked in television, Erickson had a pretty robust vision for the show, as Stiller spearheaded its visual language with a several-hundred-page book of architecture and movie references. Whereas Lumon was initially conceived as a “mundane ’90s office building,” Stiller instilled a cold, ’80s-inspired retro-futurism.

As the actors signed on, the characters evolved, too. In the original scripts, Mark’s innie glided through work with a charming snarkiness (or, as Stiller puts it, “that familiar thing” Scott does). But once he began inhabiting the role, Scott knew the character had to be introduced as a “true believer” of the company.

“At the beginning there was, with Innie Mark, a little hint of cynicism about Lumon from the start. A shift we made was making him more of a company man at first and letting Helly be the source of that cynicism to creep in,” says Scott, referring to Mark’s love interest, played by Britt Lower.

Early on in Season 1, Stiller even considered stepping in front of the camera. He was toying with playing a doctor of sorts, but the character was scrapped entirely (and is not to be confused with the roles played by Robby Benson and Sandra Bernhard in Season 2). “We talked about it. There was a storyline that we were thinking about, but it just didn’t feel right,” Stiller says. “It’s great that I’m not in it. I’m very happy to not have my face on the billboard.”

The writers’ room for Season 3 of “Severance” is underway in Los Angeles, with Stiller flying to the West Coast every 10 days or so, and Scott routinely popping his head in. (Both are executive producers on the show.) But despite actively working on “Severance,” neither of the men in front of me really knows how to talk about it.

“People really seem to be curious about the process,” Stiller says. “It’s hard to answer that stuff.”

While filming Season 1, Scott bought a poster board and drew out two separate timelines for Mark’s innie and outie — “because I heard that’s what Michael Keaton did in ‘Multiplicity’” — and he kept two sets of scripts with different annotations for each side of his character. “In Season 2, it was just one big pile of stuff,” he says.

“Everyone has their own system of keeping track of things,” Stiller says, adding that Erickson has written character biographies and histories. “We all live with the show so much. It’s in us, too.”

A topic about “Severance” that has been overly discussed is the three-year gap between seasons, with the makers of the show citing the Hollywood labor strikes as the primary reason for the delay. But one report from April 2023 blamed “scrapped scripts,” “showrunners who don’t speak to each other” and a “toxic environment” behind the scenes.

“Stuff that happens behind the scenes should happen behind the scenes. I don’t want to tell people the inner workings of what goes on because, frankly, it’s private,” says Stiller. 

“Everybody on the show gets along. There’s never been any weirdness on our show between anybody,” he assures. Still, “I don’t think there’s ever been any creative process that doesn’t have some conflict, and that’s actually really important, because you’re questioning and constantly trying to make sure that the choices you’re making are the ones that are going to hold up in two years.”

An hour into our interview, I turn to a page in my notebook labeled “Questions They Probably Won’t Answer.” I rapid-fire at Stiller.

How many episodes have been written for Season 3? (Long pause.) “I don’t want to talk about where we’re at in our process.” How many seasons will you make in total? (Small grin.) “No comment.” Will John Turturro be back? (Big grin.) “No comment.”

Do you see “Severance” as a franchise with spinoff shows? Stiller speaks slowly: “There are two specific ideas — that I won’t tell you — that we’ve talked about internally as possible spinoff ideas.” Asked what stage of development the spinoff ideas are in, or whether they have been discussed with Apple, all Stiller says, with a coy smile, is: “They are nascent.”

As for other extensions of the show, Stiller says it’d “be great to have a ‘Severance’ video game.” Scott agrees: “I think it lends itself to one.” And, at some point, they want to make merchandise like Lumon keyboards, as long as it feels “bespoke and specific to the show.” 

Both Stiller and Scott have built showbiz résumés people would kill for, anchoring beloved movies and TV shows that have cut through the noise and stood the test of time. So, my last question is a doozy: Is “Severance” the definitive project of your careers?

“Ever since I read the script, I knew this is what I’ve been working toward this whole time,” says Scott. “For 25 years, I had been marching my way through the sludge to get to a place where maybe I could get a role like this. It feels like a culmination for me.”

Stiller concurs: “To have this experience at this point in my career — after having been doing it for a long time — I never want to take it for granted.”

We’ve gone 30 minutes over our allotted time, and dinner service is around the corner. People are starting to trickle into the restaurant.

Maybe Stiller and Scott can slip out the side exit, shades on, and disappear into the city. If they move quickly, maybe they can go more than 10 steps without being asked about innies or outies or Gemma or Helly.

Suddenly, a booming voice calls from inside the restaurant: “I’m just a nobody from the Bronx, but you two are the fuckin’ bomb! Can I take a picture with you?”

Not so fast.