Patricia Arquette's belief that the premise of her hit TV show Severance reflects modern reality might raise some eyebrows ahead of its sophomore season premiere.
After all, the highly acclaimed Apple TV+ drama follows the lives of seemingly ordinary office workers who turn up to what seems to be a standard office building in a nondescript American town. They clock in, greet security, sit at a cubicle in an open-plan office space for eight hours, say farewell to the security guard, and then head to their average cars in the dreary parking lot before returning home.
But, of course, in the age of premium television, there is a twist. The memories of these office workers reset as they descend in the elevator to begin their shifts at the mysterious Lumon Industries.
For the duration of the day, their office personas (Innies) have no clue about their real-life identities (Outies). They have consented to the medical procedure known aptly as severance, and are aware they have lives outside their cubicles; it's just they have no clue who they really are.
Coproduced by Zoolander actor Ben Stiller, who also directs many of the episodes, Severance featured in many critics' 'best of' lists when it first aired in 2022.
Arquette, the Oscar-winning actress for Boyhood, thinks real life is not so much stranger than Severance's fiction.
"I feel like we're all really severed," Arquette told Newsweek. "You know, there's people that have a home and a family, and then they're having an affair, and they're in love and they're like teenagers and it's, like, 'hey man, this is not integrated.'"
Arquette added that we can never be "real everywhere" and uses the world of gaming as an example, where people might have an avatar online that is completely different to their real-world selves.
"People have a whole world … they have a whole thing going on, and can be a different person at work and a different person with their friends, or their family," Arquette said.
"How are we as people going to just reintegrate ourselves to feel our own feelings and be integral everywhere?" she added.
Lumon's workers all have different reasons for choosing to undergo severance, such as lead character Mark Scout (Adam Scott). He is desperate to forget the death of his wife, even if his sweet relief lasts only the duration of a typical work day.
The severance procedure pioneered by Lumon is sold as a solution for staff to find the perfect "work-life balance," but a ragtag group of workers led by Mark begin to call it into question in season one. Mark and his team of rebels—played by Britt Lower, John Turturro and Zach Cherry—begin to unravel a mystery that will force them all to confront the true nature of their work.
Lumon's nefarious ways might be a shock to Mark, but not to viewers at home who have borne witness to their bizarre operations; these include a room in the building where a man is bottle-feeding milk to baby goats and staff receiving kooky rewards for good work including "five-minute music dance experiences." Hollywood legend Christopher Walken even appears as a severed worker running the Optics and Design department. His team installs artworks at the office, which are meant to have a subliminal influence on the workers.
Keeping workers in line and rebellion at bay is the responsibility of Arquette's character, Harmony Cobel. She is a middle manager at Lumon and a true devotee to their company's cultish ways. Her enigmatic character runs a tight ship, and anyone not towing the line will receive her explosive wrath. But she also plays a dual role in Severance as Mark's elderly, seemingly innocuous neighbor, who ingratiates herself into his 'Outie' life to keep a close eye on him.
Arquette said that, while the icy Cobel has a masterful poker face, on the other hand she can be a very dangerous person. Cobel's whole life purpose of being a loyal Lumon servant begins to unravel at the end of season one when she is fired from the company. At the beginning of season two, we find her untethered and we get the sense she is more ominous than ever, thanks to her newfound sense of freedom.
"She's been so indoctrinated by this corporation/religion her whole life. She's never really known what it's like to be completely free," Arquette said.
"A big revelation happens at the end of the first season, and at the beginning of this season, she is dealing with things she's never had to deal with before, and she really doesn't know how to see the world through any other spectrum other than this corporation," Arquette added.
Without giving too much away, Arquette said how her character evolves in season two and "starts to hear her interior voice and her instinct in a way that she never really did before."
Arquette was born to be a thespian if her family tree is anything to go by. Her grandfather was well-loved comedic actor, Cliff Arquette, and her siblings Rosanna, David and Alexis—who died in 2016—are Hollywood heavyweights in their own right.
Her career spans five decades and includes movies such as True Romance and Ed Wood, and her TV credits include playing the psychic Allison DuBois on the long-running procedural Medium and also starring in HBO's Boardwalk Empire. The actress has also won multiple major awards from her 2014 Academy Award, to multiple Emmys and Golden Globes.
Despite her impressive resume, Arquette previously told Looper in 2022 that playing Cobel was "so challenging" and had been one of the hardest roles in her career.
But her attitude to the part seems to have changed as she sinks more into Cobel's skin and the character undergoes a major development. Arquette credits her enthusiasm with her being a "happy viewer" and just as big a fan of Severance as anyone else.
"I get really turned on by a lot of different things on it [the show] and I'll show up at the set even if it's a scene I don't have anything to do with, because the workmanship and the imagination that has gone into creating these spaces is so beautiful," Arquette said.
The attention to detail of the world-building on Severance, from the 1960s-inspired office space to the costume design, has helped Arquette "dig deeply into playing my character."
"So, I've been threading that into my performance and my understanding and my mentality the whole time," Arquette said.
Cobel might be in unchartered waters in Severance's second season, but, much like Arquette's belief that the show's premise does mirror real life, so too does her character's arc. She sees it as life throwing a curve ball at Cobel, causing her to reassess her understanding of herself. According to Arquette, those jarring moments could happen to anyone of us, at any time.
"I feel like we all go through that at some moment in our lives, a reevaluating of everything and how much we realize perhaps we have somehow colluded in our own self-deception and deception from others," Arquette said, adding: "And [realizing] how we're stuck and how we've continually recreated these patterns."
Much like Cobel, once we come to these realizations as humans, we must then decide whether we are ready to break away from those patterns, if we want to at all.
"That kind of conflict and self-deception [leads] to realizing … that underneath there is this need to be loved and to be appreciated," Arquette said.
Severance is a sci-fi drama on the surface but "feels film noir," but can also be "silly and dangerous," according to Arquette. She brought the conversation back to her main point; that, regardless how bizarre it is, the show is, at its heart, a human drama.
"So, I feel like it's not just in this show and the science-fiction world that we're not integrated; it's really all around you. And maybe, with technology, it's just getting worse and weirder and weirder," Arquette said.
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