‘Severance’ Star Patricia Arquette Teases ‘Wild Ride’ Ahead for Season 2 (Exclusive)

From the writing to the performances, production design and even eerie opening credits, Apple TV+’s dystopian sci-fi series Severance has become one of the streaming giant’s newest global hits. Sparking a renewal just ahead of its Season 1 finale on Friday, the show wrapped up its twisted nine-episode arc with a massive cliffhanger teasing some very significant and shocking revelations that will no doubt keep audiences on edge until Season 2 returns. 

Following the events that send “Severed” employee Mark S. (Adam Scott)— a member of Lumon Industries who has agreed to split his memories of work from his memories of his personal life — into a frantic spiral, Severance star Patricia Arquette tells PopCulture.com exclusively what it all means for her antagonistic character in Season 2 amid that “crazy” cliffhanger.

[Major spoilers ahead for Severance, Season 1, Episode 9: “The We We Are”] As audiences have noticed throughout the season, Arquette’s unsevered Lumon executive Harmony Cobel and Mark’s “Outie” neighbor Mrs. Selvig, has shown a great interest in his well-being. But while Arquette won’t tell PopCulture.com the reasoning for Cobel’s draw to her employee, she did say she is “very interested in Mark’s feelings about his wife,” who audiences learn in the last moments of the Season 1 finale did not die and is in fact, Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), the company’s wellness counselor.

“[Cobel] knows the backstory on everyone up there. She’s interested in all of them,” she told PopCulture. “In a way, they’re a little bit of her pets and her science experiments. But she also sees them as part of her team. Even if they don’t know what they’re doing and then definitely not upper management, in a way she feels a lot safer with them than with Natalie [Sydney Cole Alexander] or other people in upper management.”

As for the cliffhanger, Arquette says the “stakes are so high” with her character that it’s also become “pretty scary” to imagine what’s next after the “Severed” team’s hack thanks to Dylan (Zach Cherry) who manipulated Lumon controls to bounce between both worlds. “It’s really kind of like a big ending of a lot of stuff and kind of a cliffhanger what’s going on here and how crazy it’s all gotten,” she said, further stating how she enjoys watching the show with the fans in real-time. “I really do like listening to the audience and talking to people or watching it, and they’re like, people are saying to me, ‘Well, I think Helly is Mark’s wife and honestly, as I’m reading them through, I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I would be wondering that too’ and people going, ‘No, but I think Harmony’s really severed,’ even though she’s two people.”

As for whether the “enigmatic” character treading both worlds and exploiting circumstances to keep a watchful eye on her employees is doing more harm than good, Arquette believes the strain between the work persona and “outie” will eventually catch up with Cobel. “Her whole life is that corporation and she thought her self-esteem is attached to that corporation and that she does — it’s like the corporation is her family, it’s her self-esteem, it’s her religion,” she said. “It’s her everything and you give up a lot when you give up everything for one thing, whatever it is and I definitely think that she’s in for a wild ride.”

While the finale will no doubt leave fans with a million more questions, Arquette admits she was in a similar boat when she first got the role. “Honestly, it’s like Pandora’s box. You ask a question, then there are 500 other questions and then something’s revealed to you, you read a new script and then there are all these other new things to wonder about, so there was really like a very mysterious way of working [on set],” she said, sharing how she has had to kind of “move through it” when getting the scripts one at a time. “[Cobel] has a lot on the line with our company and she’s all in, she’s a real company woman and I think even to the point that she’s so committed to Kier, even beyond what the company’s doing right now, her service to Kier is really never-ending.”

Severance stars Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Dichen Lachman, Michael Chernus, John Turturo, Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette. All of Severance Season 1 is now available to stream on Apple TV+.