This story contains major spoilers for the Severance season two finale, “Cold Harbor.”
The sets on Severance are characters within themselves. Viewers scour for clues and pick apart every possible prop, color scheme, and shadow. One fan even prepared for the highly anticipated season two finale by crafting an “emotional support” foldable replica of its iconic interconnected four-desk office. After all, the Apple TV+ dramedy almost entirely takes place within the walls of a megacorporation, Lumon, which severs its employees’ consciousness into an “innie” and an “outie.” The former does all the work in that office and the latter goes home never knowing what they even worked on.
Jeremy Hindle, the production designer for Severance, gave his team a very specific objective to achieve that feeling: “Design a place that if anyone ever got out of, they couldn't explain what it was.”
Hindle could’ve never anticipated the amount people would be reading into his designs: he almost passed on the show five years ago because the set as described in the script reminded him too much of any office. He still crafted a lookbook with designs inspired by industrial designers Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche, the films Fargo and Jacques Tati's Playtime, and actual offices from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Executive producer Ben Stiller was captivated by those images and he and the rest of the team joined forces to forge the visual narrative.
Ahead of the highly anticipated Severance season 2 finale season 2 finale, Hindle walked GQ through Severance’s epic sets, those creepy wax figures, and how Twin Peaks continues to inspire him.
Hindel: I mean, Milchick is just very anal. He's particular and precious, and he had the back room, which we knew [Harmony] had, but we never saw it, so we got to play with that.
Strangely, he’s much more anal and particular than Cobel in a weird way. Like an iceberg, there’s so much we don't know about them.
I wouldn't say that. Even we don't particularly know where [creator] Dan [Erickson’s] going to go with it sometimes.
It's funny, I'm not on Reddit because I'm too old for that. But my daughter’s into it. She and my son send me stuff. The Reddit people have found everything, and I think they've invented a million more.
I don't know. The work-life balance right now is really hard. People want to talk to you seven days a week. Really how I see it is the companies now want you to work 12 to 14 hours a day. So they'll let you bring your family to work, basically. Bring your photos, put them on the wall, and decorate your space because that's where you're going to live. I don't know if you've seen Google saying the optimal workday is a 12-hour day or something.
What I miss with remote work is the community connection. I'm not going to work just to make money. I'm not going to work to just design something. I love the experience. I want to hang out with all those people. We make art together. If we all made it on Zoom, I'd want to blow my brains out because it's just a lack of connectivity.
I wouldn't say Lumon at all because we've designed it to see how they break down and how they can fracture. Everything's a little bit off. Even the actors, like John Turturro and Christopher Walken, get lost in the hallway. Everybody gets lost all the time on set.
In episode four, we shot three really great scenes of snow, and then it got really warm in February last year in New York, and all the snow melted. The lake melted, that lake was CGI. 90% of the snow is CGI, so I have to redesign it.
And then the same with episode eight. Most of the factory is CGI. All the buildings exist, but we make them look like they're falling apart in visual effects. We have so much control in the show that everything is altered to the way that we feel the world of Severance could really be.
Even the outside world is always a little bit off. The core of the show is that you never know where you are really. We don't really know where in the world we are. The old cars—we don't know what year it is. The point was that you shouldn't know. You should just connect with it on its own.
I still watch Twin Peaks. I watch it every year. It's the same show to me. And you never once questioned its world, you just fell into its world. We didn't want people to connect with, "Oh, that's New York" or "That's this..." It's just that you feel like, "This is my world, even though it's not my world." It’s a little more of a dream than anything.
I feel like the only time that I was like, "Oh, this could be in a time that's recognizable," is when we get to see Gemma and Mark's house and it's like, "Okay, this is a college campus." It’s the polar opposite of the Lumon’s cold and depressing environment. It's the only time we shoot in film too. It was to show that they did have a beautiful life and it kind of fell apart and that's why they ended up here. At the same time, Lumon is tracking them through their blood donations.
Yeah, for sure. Devon and Ricken can have a sweet little fun Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pleasantville, which is hilarious. The Eagans are the wealthy ones, they're the ridiculous ones. The Eagans’s house in episode nine is so spooky. The furniture doesn't look like it's made to be sat on or anything. I think in the script it said it was almost like a Godfather ranch. I really wanted it to be similar to Lumon the office. I said, ‘Find me Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House,’ but it needed to have a subterranean level below that.
They found a house that was a big glass cube with a 10,000-foot house underground. It's all underground except for that cube above. We enlarged it in post. It's just so that they feel like they're so comfortable in no comfort. When people can get really wealthy they start to do really weird things—look at the three richest people in the world right now.
When people are that wealthy, they also don't buy regular furniture. They buy pieces that no one else can have. This is their little prize. Everything needs to be a one-off, almost.
Yeah. Which is kind of funny, but at the same time they're controlling, which is not that different, right? But it wasn’t based on that building. Niemeyer was a huge inspiration at the beginning. There were a few things that I loved—the green carpet. The MDR desk was like a playground to me.
No, it was the most freeform of all the ones that we did. The Milchick paintings are the ones that freaked me out the most. When he gets handed the gifts of the same people that were white in episode one and now they're Black. Doing those and then looking at them, it's unbelievably real. It's amazing. What did you think?
Yeah, we don't know anything about him.
There's a wax museum of the presidents of America. They're so bizarre-looking. It's as if a bunch of grannies made their clothes and somebody else made their heads. It's like a homemade kind of museum. It's not like Madame Tussaud's at all.
They're not professionally done and they were perfect. But even with the animatronics, we could only have one movement.
The goats are popular. It's really hard, because we only use baby goats, and goats don't give birth every week. It's always at a certain time, springtime and fall. They have to hunt high and low to find a baby goat that has to be the sort of size on this date that can change at any moment. Our needs change all the time when we're shooting. Animals are not fun to work with. They're fun to hang out with.
Yeah! That's such a sweet and odd moment.
Well, the thing is, Mark did make a good choice. He's really happy. And if he had gone through that door, he'd be really happy on the other side. It's just, which one of them do you want to die? I love it. Their love is beautiful to watch though, no matter what, they're both in tough places. The world's not a nice place, but they found happiness. The next season to me would be: where do they go?