‘Severance’ Star Adam Scott Reveals the Season 1 Exercise That Was ‘Really Handy’ for Season 2

Spoilers ahead for “Severance” Season 2, Episode 3.

If there is a defining scene in “Severance,” it likely belongs to Adam Scott. The image of Scott’s Mark S. twitching in an elevator as he switches between his Innie and Outie versions captures the hauntingly dystopian feeling of this Apple TV+ original.

Those elevator rides also greatly assisted Scott in Season 2, which involves Outie Mark trying to unsever himself outside of the Lumon offices. It’s a desperate action taken as part of Mark’s attempt to figure out if his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is trapped inside of Lumon.

“In Season 1, when we were figuring out the elevator scenes where you switch back and forth between Innie and Outie, that was really instructive,” Scott told TheWrap. “It was really handy, just as an exercise, to go back and forth super quick and to really sharpen the edges of what each one was … when we’re going into Season 2 and shooting these scenes, it really helped that we were able to define each one of them in such a hurry in Season 1.”

After a season spent almost exclusively in the offices of Lumon, Season 2 explores the outside world more than ever. For Scott, that meant working to better define the Outie version of Mark.

“In Season 2, it becomes more and more about [Inner and Outie Mark] being different parts of the same person,” Scott explained. “At first, it’s feeling that they have common interests. Then it’s figuring out whether or not they have differing interests and whether or not they may be on some sort of a collision course.”

From the beginning, the “Parks & Recreation” alum noted that it was important to series creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller that both versions of Mark feel like “the same guy.”

“For an actor, it’s tempting to want one of them to a have a limp and the other to have a goatee and an accent,” the actor joked. “But this needed to be two different halves of the same person, sort of in this way that you behave differently when you are at home with your family — people who have known you your whole life — versus if you are at a cocktail party with strangers. It’s an extreme version of that.”

Scott also kept the age of both versions of Mark in mind. While the Innie version of Mark is roughly two and a half years old, Outie Mark is in his 40s and has experienced “the joy, sorrow and all the stuff that goes with having a very full life. So it was a matter of adding and subtracting what that life experience was and what that life experience would do to a person and how they behave in the world.”

New episodes of “Severance” premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.

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