How ‘Severance’ Pulled Off that Dizzying Season 2 Opening

Now that “Severance” Season 2, Episode 1 is out in the world, it seems impossible to imagine it opening any way other than how it did.

Mark (Adam Scott) blinks awake in the Lumon Industries elevator — that is, his severed Innie does, immediately after learning that his late wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is still alive and was previously employed at Lumon as Miss Casey. He races through the labyrinth of sterile white hallways, searching for any sign of life — searching for his not-so-dead wife. It’s set to “Burnin’ Coal” by Les McCann to add extra momentum, until Teddy Shapiro’s haunting score creeps back in.

On the official “Severance” podcast, Scott and director Ben Stiller revealed that the opening stemmed from their own conversations. Stiller asked Scott how he would react in that situation, and they went forward from there.

“Innie Mark has just seen this picture of Miss Casey, and he realizes that she’s alive and she’s his Outie’s wife — and all of a sudden he’s back in the elevator,” Stiller explained. “And I asked you, what would you do, Adam?”

“My first kind of knee-jerk reaction was I would just start running and trying to find her,” Scott said. “I would just run toward the wellness center.”

Stiller was pleased with the response, which merited a classic “Severance” hallway tracking sequence but “more jacked up…in a way that we haven’t seen before.” The sequence ended up taking longer and growing more elaborate than perhaps even Stiller’s imagination (“much to the consternation of our scheduling team”), involving the cinematographer, ADs, production designers, gaffers, grips, visual effects, editing, and more.

“Something that on the page was maybe half a page or three-quarters of a page… ended up being probably ten different pieces, where each one had a different need in terms of what had to be done with the set.”

Scott said those pieces were shot over the course of approximately ten months; a mix of green screen shots, one with a treadmill and a motion-control camera, robotic arm, and sometimes dismantling the hallway set to the point that it could not be used for other scenes. People who have watched the episode ask Scott if he trained for all the running, but he said that performing the scene was the training.

“You should’ve said you trained by watching Tom Cruise run in ‘Mission Impossible’,” Stiller said.

“— which is actually what I did,” said Scott.

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