Mark and Gemma Scout, or Mark S. and Helly R.? “Severance” star Britt Lower stans an entirely different relationship.
“I’m secretly rooting for Gemma and Helly, but that’s a whole other thing,” she quips.
“Severance” Season 2 ended on quite a cliffhanger, as innie Mark S. (Adam Scott) decides to stay on the severed floor with Helly R. (Lower) rather than follow his outie Mark Scout’s wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) as she escapes her Lumon Industries captors. It’s a tense moment, and brings us to the question of what the relationship between innies Mark S. and Helly R. is really all about now.
“I think Mark S. is in love with Helly,” Scott tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. “He starts the season wanting to help his outie, of course, and help Miss Casey/Gemma. He sees the injustice there and looks up to his outie as sort of, for lack of a better term, the celebrity version of himself. They all have kind of this outsized image of their outie, and he wants to help. They’re on the same page, but by the time he’s in the hallway making the choice, he is not entirely sure he can trust that person. This person he’s in love with is at the other end of the hallway, and he isn’t sure if he crosses that threshold, if he’s going to cease to exist or not. So, yeah, I think he’s completely in love with her.”
Says Lower: “We’re barreling towards that question of Mark getting to make a decision at the end, and is he allowed to make that decision? And that’s the question for me, at least embedded in in that finale of, do we think he’s human? Or is the real human the outie, and that’s the one he should be making a decision for? I don’t have the answer, but it’s an interesting question.”
Scott and Lower stopped by the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast to discuss these heady subjects and more. Also on the episode, the Roundtable gets into the TV Academy’s upcoming Televerse festival and also dissects the hot drama series race. Listen below!
For a chunk of the season Lower was tasked with playing outie Helena as pretending to be innie Helly on the severed floor. That required some mental gymnastics.
“I often hear people saying, ‘Oh man, the building I was in was so Lumen’ or they’ll send me a picture of where they had lunch that day and say, ‘I had lunch at lumen today,’” Lower says. “I think there is this ability to kind of cosplay as an innie in our everyday lives, because there’s so many elevators, so many hallways.”
“Part of what was fun for me this season was getting to give Helena the task of being an actor, and so I got to decide how good of an actor she was, or not, pretending to be Helly,” Lower says. “The hardest part for me was coming back to play Helly, but not the real deal… it felt like I was drinking Diet Coke. It felt wrong.”
Meanwhile, Scott and Lower say they felt gratified that the fans got right back into the show even after the long delay between Seasons 1 and 2. And boy, do they have some theories and intense reactions to what happened this season.
“We’re so glad that the fans are engaging with these characters in such a beautifully intense way,” Lower says. “That was our goal. I think embedded in that finale is the question of, are innies human? Do you think they have the right to make a choice? And I think how people respond to that ending is a kind of Rorschach test of their personal experience.”
“When people would say that they were standing up in their living room, either screaming at the TV or cheering, just the fact that they’re standing up, or just that engaged, that they’re having a reaction like Brit said, it’s just great,” Scott says. “We couldn’t ask for anything more.”
“Severance” scored 27 Emmy nominations this year, the most of any series, which was undeniable. The show has previously won two Emmys, in 2022 for music composition and main title design. This time out, besides drama series, the show’s nods include lead actor for Scott, lead actress for Lower, supporting actor for Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and John Turturro, supporting actress for Patricia Arquette, guest actress for Jane Alexander, Gwendoline Christie and Merritt Weaver, as well as writing and directing.
“I think everyone was pretty taken aback by the sheer volume, which is just incredible and so flattering and also just gratifying, because there’s so many talented people who work on the show,” Scott says. Adds Lower: “It’s beyond, I think, what my wildest imagination could have been in college. I was sort of imagining myself doing Pinter plays and trees and whatever means possible. Like, I just always wanted to work, and it didn’t matter if it was in a cave.”
“I want to see, you could do a Pinter play in a tree,” Scott retorts. “That’s what I want to see. Be great. I know it would be great… I want to do a Ibsen play, but I want to do it under someone’s patio. That’s important to me.”
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