Actress Patricia Arquette recently joined Vanity Fair and looked back on her career highlights. During the conversation, she recalled shooting ‘Severance’ with Ben Stiller, who directed the series. According to Patricia, she had no doubt about Ben’s directing talents at that time:
“Ben and I had done a movie called ‘Flirting With Disaster‘ many years ago as actors. And then he called me to do ‘Escape at Dannemora,‘ and he was such a great director. And then he called me about ‘Severance,‘ which is a completely different character, a completely different feeling. But I really had a lot of faith in Ben as a director.”
She also admitted that she wasn’t sure if ‘Severance’ would have an audience at the time of its release due to the lockdown period:
“I just wasn’t sure if people were going to want to watch ‘Severance’ ’cause it’s so claustrophobic, so constrained, and contained. I wasn’t sure if people would want to go into that world when we were all just locked down for a year and a half, but I was happily surprised that people really responded to it.“
In 2022, Stiller told Entertainment Weekly that the team behind the series started to feel the disconnected environment of the pandemic during the shootings. However, he argued they didn’t aim to make a social commentary:
“It wasn’t intentionally commenting in any way on what’s going on now because all the scripts had been written before March 2020. But as we were existing in it and making the show, we started to feel what everybody was feeling in terms of the lack of separation between work and home life. Since we were actually going to work in this really austere, clinical, and kind of disconnected environment that we were shooting in, I think everybody was starting to feel it.”
‘Severance’ premiered on Apple TV+ back on February 18. After receiving critical acclaim, the series was renewed for a second season last year in April.
You can watch the interview below.