Severance (TV Program)

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    How Zach Cherry, Actor From ‘Severance,’ Spends His Sundays

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    Before he hits the stage for an improv show, Mr. Cherry cuddles with his rescue dog, Shrek, battles his wife in video games and heads to the movies.Zach Cherry warns that his Sundays are “pretty boring” — with the caveat that boring, for him, means a wild, 90-minute improv comedy extravaganza of nerdy jokes.“The most fun part is standing there while other people are performing and laughing really hard,” said Mr. Cherry, a 36-year-old actor and comedian who performs most Sunday nights in the fully improvised comedy show “Raaaatscraps” at Caveat on the Lower East Side. The show features a rotating cast of performers that also includes Jeff Hiller of the HBO comedy “Somebody Somewhere” and Connor Ratliff from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Mr. Cherry is best known for his role as the snarky overachiever Dylan in the dystopian Apple TV+ workplace thriller series “Severance.” On Thursday, Amazon Prime Video is set to release his latest project, “Fallout,” a postapocalyptic series based on the popular role-playing video game franchise. Mr. Cherry, a self-identified gamer, said he has played many of the nine games in the franchise.“But I often get kind of overwhelmed and don’t finish them because they’re so gigantic and there’s so much going on,” he said.Mr. Cherry, who was born in Trenton, N.J., lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife of almost two years, Anabella Cherry, 30, who teaches English as a second language at Hunter College, and their newly adopted 2-year-old rescue dog, Shrek.A SUMMONS FROM NARNIA I have the Bedtime function on my iPhone set to wake me up at 7 a.m., but almost every day I click “change for one day only” and move it later. I actually wake up around 9 a.m. I use the generic “Early Riser” tone — I’ve never changed it — which starts soft then gets gradually louder. It sounds like something you’d wake up to very gently in Narnia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hulu, HBO and Apple TV+ Know What You’re Going Through at Work

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      Workplace shows, a hit genre of the streaming era, are homing in on a knotty question: Do you have to sacrifice personal happiness to excel at your job?On a recent episode of Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show,” the television host Alex Levy is conducting a live television interview with a therapist when things take a turn toward the personal.With millions of home viewers watching, the therapist asks her to complete the sentence “I feel most alive when … ”“When I’m working,” Alex replies, with zero hesitation.The therapist responds: “Why only at work?”Alex, played by Jennifer Aniston, looks stunned. The interview has taken her into uncomfortable territory, and it takes her a moment to gather herself.The tension between personal needs and professional ambition is a common theme of the current crop of workplace shows, a dependable television genre that has found new popularity at a time when millions of people have changed their relationship with work — whether by switching jobs in the “Great Resignation,” organizing their workplaces or fighting for remote work flexibility.Alex and her fellow workplace TV protagonists struggle to separate their professional identities from their true selves. They’re wondering if they can excel in their chosen fields without letting their jobs eat them alive.On Hulu’s “The Other Black Girl,” the assistant editor Nella Rogers learns that there is danger in deciding to “bring your whole self to work” — contrary to the messaging of corporate diversity managers.On Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso,” the perky soccer coach who gives the show its name has a series of panic attacks that seem to arise from the guilt he feels over having taken a job thousands of miles from where his son and ex-wife are living.Carmen Berzatto, the genius chef on Hulu’s “The Bear,” finds himself locked in a walk-in refrigerator at the end of the show’s second season, unleashing a stream of curses as he castigates himself for having allowed his personal life to get in the way of his ambitions.In many ways these characters reflect the feelings of millions of restless workers of recent years. Some 50 million Americans are now doing their jobs from home, at least part time, and many have grown attached to the flexibility. Others have been job-hopping or fighting for higher wages. And so far this year, some 472,300 workers have gone on strike, up from 58,100 two years ago.When managers began insisting that employees return to the office in the wake of the pandemic, hundreds of workers walked out of Amazon’s headquarters in protest, and dozens of Apple employees signed petitions demanding permanent flexibility.Across industries and companies, workers have been asking how much of their lives they are willing to give over to their bosses.Julia DufosséIn the years leading up to the pandemic, plenty of employers subtly and not so subtly communicated that a workplace could be a substitute for home. Silicon Valley executives offered their employees free meals, lavish happy hours and on-site Zumba. The underlying assumption seemed to be that workers didn’t have to leave the office to find community, which some interpreted to mean that they never should.Human resources executives encouraged employees to dress as “your authentic self” (per emails to Meta’s recruits), further blurring the boundaries between the private person and the worker who is expected to trade more than 40 hours a week for a paycheck.But is it wise to “bring your whole self to work” when you may be feeling sad, frazzled or in the mood to loaf? And what if the real you has values that don’t align with the aims of the company you work for?Those tensions are at the heart of “Severance,” whose employees come to realize the mysterious entity they work for is up to no good, and “The Other Black Girl,” in which Nella suffers professional consequences after confronting the publishing house’s literary star about a racist depiction in his latest book. Hazel-May McCall, the company’s “other Black girl,” had promised to support Nella’s righteous stance, only to step back at the crucial moment.“You just have to be the person they want you to be,” Hazel-May tells Nella at one point.Workplace shows have long been a television staple, but the characters who populated earlier programs in the genre seemed to get very little work done. Jim, on “The Office,” sticks Dwight’s stapler in Jell-O; Kenneth, on “30 Rock,” insists that he has to marry an envelope before he licks it.There is less goofing off in the workplace shows that have been among the most talked about programs since the rise of streaming. The main characters tend to be dead serious about their jobs, nakedly ambitious. Carmy, of “The Bear,” desperately wants that Michelin star; Alex, of “The Morning Show,” would be crushed if her Nielsen numbers were to slip; even the sweet-natured Ted Lasso would be sorely disappointed if the people around him didn’t consider him the very model of the modern-day boss.A rare old show that focused on coldblooded strivers was the NBC series “L.A. Law.” Given the current appetite for workplace shows that actually show the work, it’s no wonder that it’s making a splashy return to Hulu next month, with all its 172 episodes remastered.The characters on that series have their 21st century equivalents in the members of the Roy clan and their acolytes on HBO’s “Succession,” probably the buzziest workplace show since “Mad Men.” In almost every episode up to its finale last spring, it presented one hideous variation after another on the theme of how people intent on corporate maneuvering end up cannibalizing their deepest relationships and betraying those closest to them.At one point, the back-room operator Tom Wambsgans, in the middle of a typically brutal argument with his wife, Shiv Roy, tells her that she would make a bad mother. He doesn’t realize she’s pregnant when he says this. In a milieu where the distinctions between personal and work selves are hazy at best, he seems unable to fathom who she might be when detached from her ruthless corporate persona.The notion that we might be able to separate the people we are at home from the people we are at work is made literal in the sci-fi series “Severance.” Its main characters have undergone brain surgery to sever their work and personal selves: the nonwork personas are called “outies,” the workplace versions are “innies,” and neither has any idea what the other is up to. When the protagonist’s two selves begin to bleed into each other, he is distraught — and he assumes a leading role in a workers’ revolt.For Carmy, on “The Bear,” there is little separation between life and work, and he seems to believe that excelling at his job must come at the cost of personal misery. Flashbacks to his family’s household Christmas celebration on Season 2 of “The Bear” show his mother making everyone around her suffer as she prepares a sumptuous feast. It’s clear that she’s a wonderful cook, but the ambience around her meal leaves something to be desired. (After much screaming, fighting, fork-throwing and tears, she crashes a car into the side of the house.) Carmy’s challenge is to push himself to greatness in the kitchen without repelling anyone who might want to get close to him.It’s a problem he has yet to solve by the season finale, when he is reciting a soliloquy of self-loathing in the locked walk-in refrigerator on the opening night of his restaurant. He blames the fact that he has been too involved with his new girlfriend — too content, too soft, too much in love — to give the workplace the intense level of attention it requires.When the slightly less tortured Ted Lasso faces his own work-versus-personal-life crisis, he goes in the opposite direction, deciding that he must leave his job in England so that he can be a better father to his son, who is in Kansas.The “Ted Lasso” team and Apple have been coy about whether the series will return for a fourth season. But if it does come back, and if it continues to follow the ups and downs of its titular character, it might be a tough sell. A show about a contented father who has hit upon the correct approach to work-life balance doesn’t seem like the kind of thing people want to watch these days. More

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      10 Stages and Screens Where I Saw Connection

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      For our critic-at-large, “Fat Ham,” “Severance,” “A Strange Loop” and “Sandman” were some of the places she found truth and transcendence.I never venture too far from a theater, but when I did have some time away from New York stages, I was watching TV and movies. In so many of my favorites of 2022, there’s a sense of humanity to the work, whether that means it featured people connecting or simply being honest with themselves and others. Here are the plays, musicals, shows and films that stuck with me this year.‘Cost of Living’That Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 play is written with such gut-busting empathy and humanity shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who’s read the script or seen the previous productions. And yet, “Cost of Living” was still surprising — stunning, even — thanks to the four actors (Gregg Mozgala, Katy Sullivan, Kara Young and David Zayas) and their portrayal of caregivers and patients in a story about the ways we look after one another and what that care costs us. Plays about connections can so easily turn into sentimental weep-fests that manipulate you into tears, but the script, cast and Jo Bonney’s compassionate direction made this Broadway gem feel not just tender but true. (Read our review of “Cost of Living.”)Gregg Mozgala and Kara Young in “Cost of Living.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘300 el x 50 el x 30 el’When I try to describe this epic work by the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman, I get bogged down in contradictions: Grotesque yet radiant. Chaotic but woven into coherence by theme and feeling. Depressing, yet steeped with something even more forceful than joy — utter transcendence. Transforming the Harvey Theater into a village, with live animals and a pond, “300 el” drew inspiration from the biblical story of Noah’s ark. A film crew circled the stage, providing interior views to a pigeon homicide, a deadly game of William Tell and a feast where even the furniture is devoured. When the production ends in song and dance — a tameless exaltation of noise and movement — it seemed to leave even the air in the theater tremulous with excitement. (Read our feature on “300 el x 50 el x 30 el.”)‘Fat Ham’More than anything — including James Ijames’s whip-smart writing, Saheem Ali’s vivacious direction and the cast’s delightful performances — what most stood out to me in the Public’s staging of “Fat Ham” was the joy that seemed to emanate from every person in the room. Who knew “Hamlet,” a tragedy rife with revenge and murder, could be expanded to become a work about queerness and Black masculinity — and a funny, smart work at that? Ijames, apparently, and Ali, whose gleaming production ended in what felt like a party where everyone, audience included, was welcome to attend. (Read our review of “Fat Ham.”)‘A Strange Loop’It’s been quite a year for Black queer theater, due in large part to the Broadway debut of Michael R. Jackson’s mind-bending, genre-busting musical “A Strange Loop.” The production, starring an unforgettable Jaquel Spivey, succeeds on multiple levels: It provides trenchant commentary on Black art, the Black body, religion, masculinity and queerness, while also being laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. As for the technical elements, its structure, choreography and score coalesce into a prime example of what Broadway can do at its best. (Read our review of “A Strange Loop.”)Jaquel Spivey stars in the Broadway musical “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Oratorio for Living Things’I knew I was seeing something special when I went to Ars Nova’s production of Heather Christian’s “Oratorio,” because I was infected with a desperate urge to see it again — even before I was through seeing it the first time. Having grown up with a Catholic education and Sunday masses, I’ve never felt connected to religious institutions, but Christian’s profound work, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, created a kind of secular mass for nonbelievers and believers alike. The exquisite vocals of the cast were magnified by the miniature amphitheater-style setup of the space, which created an aural experience that — like the text itself — felt both grand and intimate. (Read our review of “Oratorio for Living Things.”)‘English’I’m a sucker for works that examine language — the politics of it, the limitations and freedoms that can be found in words. So I was already onboard for Sanaz Toossi’s play, about a class in Iran where the students are preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the cast draws the audience into its word games, linguistic stumbles and individual struggles to learn and assimilate, whether for work or family or dreams of a life in America. (Read our review of “English.”)‘The Sandman’As a fierce fan of the author Neil Gaiman and owner of his complete “Sandman” graphic novel collection, I was so nervous about Netflix’s adaptation that I asked a friend — a fellow fan — to watch the first episode with me for emotional support. The series does justice to its characters with perfectly cast actors, including a mesmerizing Tom Sturridge, who embodies the brooding, awe-inspiring king of dreams with such finesse and gravitas that it’s as though Morpheus himself has escaped from the comics. It’s not just the characters who are well-matched; the world of “Sandman” is portrayed with sweep, imagination and such respect for the original illustrations that much of the dialogue and panels are replicated. I can’t wait for Season 2. (Read our critic’s notebook on “The Sandman.”)Gwendoline Christie and Tom Sturridge in the Netflix series “Sandman.”Netflix‘Severance’“Severance” may be my new favorite TV series. Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic, still buzzed with enthusiasm even months after my second time binge-watching it. Adam Scott gives a stellar performance as an employee of a shady corporation who elects to have his consciousness split between his work and outside selves. The show has an exquisite eye and ear for terror, wit and mundane interactions, so that it manages to be both otherworldly and eerily familiar. As for the script — the dialogue’s so fantastic that it makes me want to be a better writer. (Read our review of “Severance.”)‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I’ve often wondered, in our age of multiversal franchises, what a multiverse narrative would look like if the story were driven by the characters’ emotional development and interpersonal relationships rather than just battle scenes, Easter eggs, and routes to spinoffs and sequels. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was my answer. It contained the unpredictability and boundary-expanding possibilities of the multiverse while staying grounded in the story of a family. Every moment of the film held a new delight. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)‘Oresteia’When I think back to Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ trilogy of Greek tragedies about a family that eats itself from the inside out, I think of one moment. Klytemnestra is grieving after her husband Agamemnon has killed their daughter Iphigenia because of a prophecy that the act would grant his army “fair winds” in war. After the deed, the winds sweep in, the doors to the house are flung open, ethereal white light streams in, and Klytemnestra is caught in a frenzy of flying papers. But what made the production so memorable wasn’t just the special effects but Anastasia Hille’s electrifying performance as Klytemnestra, a woman who folds in to grief and lets it fuel her revenge. (Read our review of “Oresteia.”) More

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      Adam Scott on His First Emmy Nomination for ‘Severance’

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      Scott earned first Emmy nomination on Tuesday, for best actor in drama for “Severance.”To stay afloat and avoid disappointment, Adam Scott said he doesn’t anticipate big nominations. It’s a healthier state of mind, he said, and he’s become accustomed to not hearing his name called.“I did not think I was going to be nominated,” he said. “I was just trying to focus on everyone else and take a walk and put it out of my head.”After learning he received an Emmy nomination for best actor in the Apple TV+ drama “Severance,” Scott said it was an honor to be named next to actors like Brian Cox, nominated for “Succession,” and Jason Bateman, nominated for “Ozark.”“Severance,” which is also nominated for best drama, presents an eerie picture of workplace culture in which employees of an enigmatic, vaguely sinister corporation named Lumon Industries undergo a surgical procedure that severs their work memories from their personal memories, in an effort to keep company secrets confidential. Scott plays Mark Scout, who after losing his wife, Gemma (played by Dichen Lachman), in a car accident, substitutes monotonous shifts pocketing numbers into digital boxes at Lumon for proper healing.In a phone interview on Tuesday, Scott discussed the show’s cliffhanger ending and how he used a personal loss to build his character. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Where were you when you first heard of the nomination?I was in the middle of walking the dogs when I got the phone call and was surprised and just couldn’t be more flattered and honored. It was really a unique feeling, to say the least.Why do you think the show was so successful?It’s a good question because when we were making it, we, if not daily, very often would stop and look at each other and just be like, “This is really [expletive] weird. Is anyone going to connect with it?” We didn’t know, and then we would just kind of shrug our shoulders and put our heads down and keep going.What were the most challenging scenes for you to film?I was going through a grieving process, because my mom had died before I went out to New York. I walked into that apartment and realized I wasn’t done grieving at all, because my family kind of cushioned me from this at home. And that’s what love is for in a lot of ways, is to help you through a process like that, and we were locked down in Los Angeles so I was able to kind of make it through. But then I got to New York six months later, closed the door and I was by myself and I realized immediately I was not done absorbing this loss. The show was right there, and so I processed my grief through the show.What does “Severance” hope to teach about how to cope with grief?For outtie Mark, that’s what the season was about: grief, and how is he going to handle it? And is he going to handle it? Or is he going to continue pushing it away? And I was asking myself the same question. So, I decided to deal with it, but deal with it along with Mark.There’s a scene where I’m on the side of the road where my wife had a car accident in the show, and we just happened to shoot that scene on the one-year anniversary of my mom passing away. It was just a sheer coincidence. But I was kind of carrying it around with me all day and trying not to kind of zero in on it. It really, again, helped me with my grieving process.What does the show aim to tell viewers about how to manage what happens at work and what happens at home, particularly amid a pandemic when many people have had to work remotely?Work is something that you do to achieve one thing or another. A job is a place where you go, if you can define it like that, and I think people started re-evaluating their relationship with those things. I think we all found out that home and your life, and your life at work, they all started to blend into sort of one thing.How did the cast and the director Ben Stiller compose the last moments of the season finale?The moment where I call Mrs. Selvig “Ms. Cobel” accidentally — while we were shooting, I remember saying to Patricia [Arquette] and Ben, “OK if we have them, if they care at this point in the final episode, if we’ve laid the bread crumbs properly, this moment is going to be so fun and so huge.”But that’s a delicate process, getting to the point where that actually has impact. It’s not easy to put it all together so that actually happens. It could just as easily be a shrug if you’re not invested in the characters or the story or whatever. So, hearing that people threw things at their television or got up and walked out of the room or just screamed at the end of Episode 9 is delightful. We really had no idea if anyone would care. More

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      In ‘Severance,’ Adam Scott Gets to Work

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      The actor’s latest role is in another workplace series, but this one is more dystopian and involves elective brain surgery. Real-life parallels abound.“Severance,” an unnerving workplace drama, was originally scheduled to begin filming in March 2020, but pandemic shutdowns pushed the shoot to the fall. So in October 2020, Adam Scott, the show’s star, left his family in Los Angeles and flew to New York.For more than eight months, on the days when he could work — production paused a few times for positive tests, and Scott himself caught Covid-19 in February 2021 — he was driven to a busy studio in the South Bronx and surrounded by (shielded, masked) colleagues. Then he was driven back to a silent Tribeca apartment where he spent his nights alone, which made for an odd parallel with the show itself.“Severance,” which premieres its first two episodes on Apple TV+ on Feb. 18, takes a speculative approach to work-life balance. Scott plays Mark Scout, a department chief at Lumon Industries, a shadowy corporation. (When was the last time a TV show had a corporation that wasn’t?) Mark and his co-workers have each voluntarily undergone a surgical procedure known as severance, which creates a mental cordon so that your work self has no knowledge or memories of your home self and vice versa. Think of it as an N.D.A. For the soul.Scott, 48, hasn’t always had great balance. “My boundaries are all over the place,” he said. “I’ve often put far too much of my self-worth into whether I’m working or not and the perception of my work once I’ve done it. That’s unhealthy.” Living by himself, away from his wife and two children, grieving his mother who had died just before the pandemic, that balance didn’t get better.Scott in “Severance,” in which his character has a surgical procedure that creates a mental cordon between his memories of work and of home. The shoot was an oddly parallel experience.Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+Still, the job gave him a place to put those feelings. The role demands that he alternate between the guileless “innie” Mark, a vacant middle manager, and the dented “outtie” Mark, mourning his dead wife. Some scenes have the feel of a workplace comedy, a genre Scott knows intimately. (Imagine “Parks and Recreation,” where Scott spent six seasons, remade by Jean-Paul Sartre.)Others have the feel of a thriller, a drama, a sci-fi conjecture — all styles he is less familiar with. Ultimately, this dual role allows Scott to do what he does best: play a blandly handsome everydude while also showing the pain and shame and passion underlying that pose.“He has this understanding of how strange it is to be normal,” said Ben Stiller, an executive producer and director of the series. “There’s a normalcy to him, a regular guyness. He also has an awareness that there’s no real regular guy.”Scott has only ever wanted to be an actor. As a child in Santa Cruz, Calif., he watched as a film crew transformed his street into a set for a mini-series version of “East of Eden.” The road became dirt. The houses reverted to their Victorian origins. Horses and carriages drove past his lawn. This was magic, he thought, and he wanted to do whatever he could to enter what he called “that crazy magical make-believe world.”Whenever he had a moment alone (and as the youngest child of divorced parents, this was pretty often) he would imagine himself as the hero of his own movie — usually a Steven Spielberg movie. He acted throughout school, except for a year or two in high school when he worried what theater kid status would do to his popularity. But he was also a water polo player, so somehow it all worked out.Scott, 48, barely scraped by for years in pursuit of his acting dream until a role in the 2008 comedy “Step Brothers” changed his life. “I was hanging on by a piece of floss for 15 years,” he said. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHe enrolled in a two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. A classmate and fast friend, Paul Rudd, admired his work even then. “I’m like, this guy’s really funny,” Rudd remembered. “And dry and really bright, obviously.”Scott graduated at 20, made the rounds and spent a decade and a half booking just enough work to keep himself solvent — a few episodes here, a supporting part in a movie there — without ever feeling like he’d arrived.“I was hanging on by a piece of floss, for 15 years,” he said.In the early ’00s, his wife-to-be, Naomi Scott (then Naomi Sablan), asked him if he had a backup plan. “And it was so, so painful, his reaction to that,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘There is none.’”Then it happened. He landed a role in the 2008 Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy “Step Brothers” after another actor dropped out. Then he starred as Henry in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” replacing Rudd, who had other commitments. He missed out on a role on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” but the show’s creators brought him in at the end of the second season as Ben Wyatt, a love interest for Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. Suddenly, he had become a left-of-center leading man.In “Step Brothers,” he played a yuppie chucklehead, but the roles in “Party Down” and “Parks and Recreation” felt more personal. He brought those years of not making it to Henry, a would-be actor whose career has been deformed by a series of beer commercials, and to Ben, a strait-laced accountant with a disreputable past.Scott with Ken Marino, left, in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” in which Scott played a failing actor whose career was deformed by a series of beer commercials.Ron Batzdorff/Starz“I was like, oh, of course, I feel deeply all of these things,” Scott said, “Having been here for 15 years and not having a whole lot to show for it, and being a bit wounded by the circumstances of this town.”He loved the work. “His defining characteristic is that he just really wants to do a good job,” Michael Schur, a creator of “Parks and Recreation,” told me.But he didn’t love everything that came with it. “I started getting recognized, and it just felt completely different than I had imagined that feeling for those 15 or so years.” Scott said. “It felt more like I had a disease on my face than it did being recognized.”“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” he continued. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Scott was speaking on a video call from his Los Angeles home. The call had started a little late because he had spilled an espresso all over the table where his computer sat. The espresso had come from a top-line Italian contraption that takes a half-hour to warm up and that he cleans lovingly every night. If these sound like the habits of a man to whom the small stuff matters, maybe!Scott (with Nick Offerman, left, and Sam Elliott, right) starred in the hit NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation” for six seasons. “He has a powerful store of humility,” Offerman said.Colleen Hayes/NBCIn conversation, he was candid, self-critical, determinedly nice, without quite sacrificing the wryness that often defines him onscreen. He had shown up in the video window — in glasses, ghost pale, neckbearded — wearing a T-shirt and a sweatshirt underneath a flannel. A half-hour in, he took the flannel off.“Sorry, I just started sweating under your question,” he said. (The question: “What made ‘Party Down’ so great?”) He doesn’t love doing press, but he made it seem as if we had all the time in the world. He kept telling me how great I was doing.“He has a powerful store of humility,” Nick Offerman, his “Parks and Recreation” co-star, had told me. Offerman also said that what Scott does so well — onscreen, but maybe offscreen, too — is to embrace what he called, “a sort of geeky normalcy, the flavor of behavior that most people try to avoid if they can help it, because it’s too human.” (Offerman also told me to ask what Scott does to his hair to make it so voluminous, but Scott wasn’t talking.)Scott isn’t cool. Unapologetic in his fandom, he has even made a podcast about how much he loves U2. His enthusiasm for R.E.M. is legendary. Often his characters go a little too hard, want things a little too much. (Evidence? “The Comeback Kid,” a Season 4 episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which an out-of-work Ben takes a deep dive into Claymation. And calzones.)But several of his colleagues also identified a kind of reserve in him — a sense that he holds something back while performing, which makes the performance richer.“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” Scott said of becoming someone recognizable. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“There is something about the set of his eyes,” Schur said. “You just sense that there’s depth there, something that you can’t immediately access.”Poehler, Scott’s “Parks and Recreation” co-star, echoed this. “There’s a very internal, secret, secretive part of him as an actor,” she said.That tension makes him right for the linked roles of “Severance.” The try-hard part works for the “innie” Mark, a man who just wants to do a great job, no matter how bizarre the job is. And that reserve helps with “outtie” Mark, who spackles his pain with booze, jokes and distance.“It’s the same guy,” Scott explained. “It’s just one is more or less clean, and the other has lived many years and has gone through a lot of things.” Playing the “outtie” made him realize how much he had pushed away his own grief over his mother’s death. So that’s in there, too.It was a long shoot and, given the pandemic protocols, often a lonesome one. Some days were spent almost entirely within a windowless Lumon Industries room — all fluorescent light and plastic partitions and soul-crushing wall-to-wall carpet. “It definitely kind of drove me mad,” John Turturro, Scott’s co-star, told me.Scott put it more mildly. “It was a strange eight months,” he said.But he had a job, the only job he has ever wanted. So Scott, who has never held a real office job, showed up to the imitation office every day that a negative P.C.R. test permitted. He had work to do. More