Adam Scott on using Severance’s weird, retrofuturistic computers

Much of Severance — the sci-fi workplace thriller on Apple TV Plus — takes place in a brightly lit office, with characters huddled over strange computers where they do work they’re told is both mysterious and important. In the show, that work looks a bit like an alternate reality take on Minesweeper, except the characters are attempting to find numbers that “feel scary,” even though they don’t know what that really means — and the cast is largely going through the same experience.

The computers on the show are functional, so when Mark and Helly are moving pixelated numbers around on a screen, that’s something the performers are doing on set. “When you see us, we really are refining numbers,” Adam Scott, who plays Mark and serves as a producer on the show, tells The Verge. “There is actually a way to do it.”

The computers are the brainchild of prop master Cath Miller and production designer Jeremy Hindle. The office-dwelling characters in Severance have undergone a procedure that separates their work selves from their life outside, effectively creating two people, one of whom exists only within the basement offices of Lumon Industries. As Hindle told me back in 2022, this allowed the team to design the computers with playfulness in mind. “We kept thinking, ‘If you’re experimenting with these people, what would you put in front of them?’” Hindle told me. “Imagine how fun it would be to sit at this thing, as opposed to if I put a laptop in front of them. It’s like a child’s device.”

For Scott, using the devices — which pair a vintage-yet-touchscreen monitor with a keyboard that has a built-in trackball — was a nostalgic experience. “They remind me of the old Apple IIe [computers] I grew up using that my brother and my dad had,” he explains. But even though the terminals look familiar, they’re just different enough to make them feel almost surreal — a perfect fit for Severance. “They also have their own interface, and their own keyboard and trackball, but the buttons are in an odd place ergonomically,” Scott adds. “So it’s tricky to use. But I feel like me and [costars Zach Cherry, Britt Lower, and John Turturro] have all figured out how to use it.”

Scott says that the functionality of the computers is a big help for his performance, noting that, often, when actors interact with a gadget, there’s nothing really there onscreen. But on Severance, each actor is able to “actually refine these numbers and come up with your own strategies and apply your own meaning to it.”

That meaning is important because, well, nobody knows what’s really going down in Lumon’s basement. They sit there clicking around a computer without understanding the importance of their work (at this point in the story, viewers don’t know the importance, either). So for the actors, actually using the computers and being just as clueless as their characters helps them better inhabit the role.

“These people have no idea what they’re doing,” says Scott. “They just know that they need to refine numbers by feeling sort of when they get scary. Getting to actually do that when we’re on camera is really important and really helps a lot.”

Severance season 2 hits Apple TV Plus on January 17th.