Severance Made Major Changes To Mark's Innie After Adam Scott Signed On
With two seasons of "Severance" under our collective belt, it's hard to remember that, at the beginning of Dan Erickson's seriously unorthodox workplace drama, Adam Scott's Mark S. is a truly devoted employee at Lumon Industries. Aside from managers and other higher-ups, employees at Lumon agree to a procedure known as "severance" where they split their consciousness into an innie and an outie. Innie Mark, known around the office as Mark S., works with several other Innies, including Helly R. (Britt Lower), Irving B. (John Turturro), and Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), while Outie Mark mourns the supposed loss of his wife Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman). Apparently, though, Mark wasn't always supposed to be super-loyal to Lumon — because the show hoped to take advantage of Scott's famously snarky performances.
According to an interview in Variety with Scott and Ben Stiller, who works on the series as an executive producer and director, Erickson and Stiller originally envisioned Mark S. as a bit of a cynic (Stiller even called it "that familiar thing" Scott does in a lot of his roles). Scott, on the other hand, felt like Mark S. needed to trust Lumon without any doubts.
"At the beginning there was, with Innie Mark, a little hint of cynicism about Lumon from the start. A shift we made was making him more of a company man at first and letting Helly be the source of that cynicism to creep in," Scott revealed, referencing Helly R.'s immediate suspicions regarding Lumon. (Helly is the newest employee on the severed floor at the start of season 1, and ironically, we eventually learn that her outie is Helena Eagan, the heir to Lumon Industries itself.) It's a good thing Scott joined "Severance" for many reasons, but his inspired instinct regarding Mark S. is just one of them.
In the season 2 finale of Severance, Adam Scott argues with himself — and Innie Mark's worldview is shattered
It takes two full seasons, but at the end of season 2, it's safe to say that Mark S. and Mark Scout are both extremely disillusioned with Lumon Industries. After staging an overtime contingency, Mark S. manages to transport himself to the outie world and learns that Lumon's wellness counselor Ms. Casey is Gemma; realizing that she's still alive, it's at this point that Mark loses any trust he had left in Lumon and begins a dangerous reintegration process that will combine his innie and outie. This culminates in a genuinely wild scene where Mark argues with himself via camcorder, aided by his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and his former Lumon manager Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). As Adam Scott told GQ in a profile after the season 2 finale aired, this was, unsurprisingly, a huge challenge!
After saying that you can usually build energy off of your scene partner (and that he was actually his own screen partner here), Scott said he just tried to keep things as varied as possible:
"[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."
The heart of the matter with this scene, though, is that this is the first time that Mark S. really abandons his starry-eyed view of both Lumon and the outie world. "All along Helly's been talking about the outies, like, 'Don't buy into their bullsh*t,'" Scott mused. So, that's in his head, but I don't think Mark's ever felt that way about his outie." Scott continued:
"But I think when he starts hearing about these signifiers, like Outie Mark pushing a bit hard when selling reintegration, and then getting Helly's name wrong. It's like, 'Is this guy completely f**king bulls**t? He thinks he's so much smarter than me. Maybe he is.' It's like when you have a sibling and you can just tell they're bulls**tting because it's like, 'Oh, that's how I do it.' I think Outie Mark obviously underestimates this guy and doesn't think of him as a fully functioning adult human being. And he's become one, at least in the limited capacity."
Severance is, as Adam Scott says, the point to which his entire career has been building
The way Adam Scott tells it, he heard about "Severance" from Ben Stiller ... and he was immediately interested in the project. "Ben gave me the quick rundown — for lack of a better term, the elevator pitch," Scott said in that same Variety interview. "I couldn't shake it. I couldn't stop thinking about it for a year and a half until I read the script."
Scott was also the subject of a full New Yorker profile in late 2024 about his many workplace related roles — lest we forget, his other huge TV successes include "Party Down" and "Parks and Recreation," which center around a catering company and a local government office, respectively — and in that piece, Erickson said that he actually wrote the dual roles of Mark S. and Mark Scout with Scott in his head. Michael Schur, who worked with Scott on "Parks and Recreation," told profiler Rachel Syme, "He's memorable in unmemorable parts" — and while this definitely sounds unflattering at first, Erickson also told Syme he was looking for an everyman who could introduce the audience to the sprawling, mysterious world of "Severance."
Scott's casting in "Severance" is, frankly, perfect, and as far as Scott is concerned, it represents a major peak in his career. "Ever since I read the script, I knew this is what I've been working toward this whole time," Scott said in the Variety profile. "For 25 years, I had been marching my way through the sludge to get to a place where maybe I could get a role like this. It feels like a culmination for me."
"Severance," including Scott's stunning central performance, is streaming on Apple TV+ now.