A month before Severance first aired in February 2022, billboards emblazoned with huge images of Adam Scott wearing a thousand-yard stare began to spring up around Los Angeles. “You always think it’s going to be this joyful moment when you see something like that,” says Scott, the show’s star and one of its producers. He appeared on the posters alongside the tagline “We’re all different people at work”, a wink to the premise of the series, a twisty, darkly comic thriller about office workers who have an experimental chip implanted into their brains in order to forget their work lives outside the office, and vice versa.
Scott had, he adds, “been waiting a long time for that moment – but I had this immediate adverse reaction. I got nauseous and my palms started sweating, because we had no idea how this thing would be received.” He had found Severance “fascinating and sad and funny” and thought it was something special, but it had been filmed in a Covid bubble and, he adds, “you never know”. Despite a TV career that has included the likes of Parks and Recreation and Big Little Lies, he was worried that he was about to become the face of a flop. “This is a weird show,” he says. “I thought maybe people were going to think we were weirdos.”
