Adam Scott Found A Key Severance Season 2 Moment Deeply Weird

At the end of the second season of "Severance," Mark (Adam Scott) has arrived at a special cabin room that presents him with a strange and rare opportunity. While inside the cabin room, Mark is his "innie," that is, he only has memories of working inside the bleakly corporate basement of Lumon. He has no memories of his life outside of Lumon. Then, when he steps through the door out to the balcony, Mark reverts to being his "outie," that is, he only has memories of his ordinary life and can't remember anything that occurs inside the walls of Lumon. Although Mark is merely swapping back and forth between two sets of memories, the bifurcation has led Lumon employees to think of themselves as two different people. 

Outie Mark, by that point in the series, has discovered that his presumed-dead wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is actually alive and being held captive inside a Lumon sub-basement. To free her, though, Outie Mark must convince Innie Mark to help. Innie Mark, as one might suspect, is reluctant. Because he has no memories of Gemma, he has little at stake in rescuing her. Also, Innie Mark has developed feelings for his co-worker Helly (Britt Lower), and leaving Lumon would essentially end his life.

Thanks to the balcony at the cabin, Mark's two halves can communicate. Outie Mark records a message on a camcorder while sitting on the balcony, and then steps inside, where Innie Mark takes control and watches the message. Innie Mark then records his rebuttal and steps outside, where Outie Mark watches. It's the easiest way for Mark to talk to Mark. 

 Scott spoke with EW recently, and he described that scene as immensely weird. He found that, while rehearsing the scene and nailing the technical aspects of playing two characters, Scott would have to pause to note that "Severance" is a very strange program. 

Scott, show creator Dan Erickson, and episode director Ben Stiller all had a plan on how they were going to shoot the Innie Mark/Outie Mark scene, but they found that they had to abandon that plan very quickly. When Adam Scott received the script for the episode, he got a camcorder and recorded himself performing both halves of the scene in his apartment. The idea was to use the apartment-shot footage on set, giving Scott and the editors something to react to and time the scene around. The apartment-shot scenes would then be replaced, in post, by on-set footage.

But, because of the nature of "Severance," the scene was rewritten on the fly. The rewrites rendered Scott's home-recorded footage useless. Eventually, Scott and Stiller merely shot the final draft of the script using a camcorder on set to record live footage. The shooting of the scene played out more or less the same way as the scene itself. Scott figured filming the scene would be a weird actorly experience, but the surreality of everything hit him hard. As he put it:

"I think that part of what I was thinking about, at least at the beginning of the scene when they first start talking to each other and looking at each other on these screens, was just how weird that would be, and just to take some time at the top to marvel at how f***ing weird this is. Ben felt the same way, so it was nice to have a beat of that in there. Because sometimes in science fiction, you are going with the reality of the story — the reality of the world — and you forget to take a moment for people to react, like, a person. Like, "Holy s***, can you believe this is happening?"

The real Adam Scott began to lose memories of what the outside world was like, it seems. Which is wholly fitting for "Severance."