Adam Scott: ‘It had this sinister undercurrent that’s fun’

Ben Stiller, who’s best known for comedy, pivots to sci-fi in “Severance,” a new thriller premiering Friday (Feb. 18) on Apple TV+.

“I thought it was a really amazing concept,” said Stiller, 56, who’s directing the series. “Being able to go to work and forget everything about your life. Do your work, come out, and then forget everything that happened in work. The questions that brings up of why we’re doing the work we do – why we spend our time in life busying ourselves and what the meaning of it all is – those greater questions are addressed in the metaphor of the show.”

“Severance” stars Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette and John Turturro and is set at the mysterious company Lumen Industries, where employees on a certain floor opt to undergo a controversial “severance” procedure that turns the “work/life balance” into a reality and severs the two.

Department head Mark (Scott), who’s had the procedure done — along with his colleagues Dylan (Zach Cherry), Irving (Turturro), fresh recruit Helly (Brit Lower) and his chilly manager, Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) — has no idea what his home life is like when he’s at work. When he enters his building after crying in the parking lot, he doesn’t remember the reason for his despair. Similarly, when he goes home each night, he has no idea what he’s been doing in his office all day.

“[The show] was something that I would want to watch as an audience member,” Scott, 48, told The Post. “It’s this mix of dark humor and satire and thriller and suspense, all with this sinister undercurrent that’s really fun. Just the idea of being at work and not knowing who you are to the outside world, and when you go home, you have no idea what your job is and what you do while you’re there had so many fun possibilities. I had to be a part of that.”

“Severance” takes a darker turn when Mark stumbles upon a reason to believe that things at their company are not as they seem, and that the severance procedure is more nefarious than they’ve been told. The show turns into a conspiracy thriller as Mark probes at what’s really going on at Lumen Industries; meanwhile, his co-worker Helly gets increasingly frustrated that her “outside self” forced her “work self” into this situation, and tries to leave the company.

Although “Severance” feels more similar to “Black Mirror” than anything else, Stiller didn’t stray too far from his comedy roots. 

“This show had a lot of different elements in it that I love,” he said. “Just the idea of a workplace comedy that has a very specific tone and humor and rhythm to it, in terms of the cadences of how everybody talks — in movies like ‘Office Space’ or shows like ‘The Office’ or ‘Parks and Recreation.’ Those all part of a distinct genre that’s evolved over the last few years that I wanted to play off in the show. And then another aspect was this weird sort of unsettling world that had a generic quality about it.

“We wanted to create a world where you couldn’t tell exactly where or when it was, or how familiar or unfamiliar it was.”