Why Making Severance Season 2 Left Adam Scott Exhausted

It's tough starring as one of the leads in "Severance." Not only do you have to play two versions of the same guy, but you have to play whatever those doppelganger things were in "Woe's Hollow." For Adam Scott, who plays innie Mark S. and outie Mark Scout, season 2 was an especially exhausting production. As he explained in a recent GQ interview:

"There's no scene on 'Severance' that isn't complicated. Over and over, I've fallen into the trap of being like, 'Oh, we're shooting the thing tomorrow where I walk into the room and tell Helly to come with me. This will be easy.' But then we're there on the day, and it's like, oh, no, this is happening. There's always nine things going on. There's no actual simple scene on the show. And that's what's so fun about it. There's no day of rest. This season in particular was draining physically for me, but that's also really good."

Scott wasn't necessarily complaining, mind you. He described the "labor-intensive" production as "a good thing" and "the most fun I've ever had working." He also spoke on how the show feels like a culmination of all the acting skills he's developed over the first thirty years of his career. As he put it, "That's part of what I love about making it: any skills I may have picked up over the years, I use it all on the show. So at the end of a 10-month season, I'm wiped out."

One particularly difficult scene Scott pointed to was the conversation between Innie Mark and Outie Mark in the season 2 finale. This was arguably the most important scene of the show so far, with our two protagonists hitting the devastating realization their goals don't align as neatly as they think. It was a sequence that needed to be done perfectly, but Scott had never acted alongside himself before. As he explained: 

"When you're in a scene with another actor, you get into a groove together and you're responding to each other. So that ends up dictating, for lack of a better word, the vibe. [When] you're by yourself and not actually talking to someone, you have to come up with what you think the vibe would be, so I just tried to vary it as much as possible so they could have a number of choices. I was just afraid of it being bad and corny. That's always my worry with anything, but particularly a scene where you're acting opposite yourself. It took a few days. We were in there for a while, we just did it tiny chunks at a time."

Another difficult scene came in the season 2 premiere, where Innie Mark walks out of the elevator for the first time since seeing the outside world. He immediately tries looking for his friends at his old office, only to find that everything's been moved around. What follows is a long ambitious tracking shot that required a motion control robot arm for one of the cameras, a digitally-erased treadmill, multiple hidden cuts and a few CGI walls for the camera to move through. The whole scene, which involved a lot of running on Scott's part, was filmed in bits throughout the production for the whole season. 

Arguably the most demanding, however, was when Scott had to film Mark's fight scene with Mr. Drummond. At one point Scott hit his head against the wall a little too hard, and they had to get a doctor to check up on him. "I got slammed into the wall. I was supposed to bring my arm up — we practiced it over and over again — but I just got caught on my suit," Scott explained. "[We] called a doctor and all that stuff. [Creator] Ben [Stiller] was making sure I'm OK, then he came up to me a little later and he goes, [whispers] 'By the way, so good.'"