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When talking about the game-changing season 2 finale of “Severance,” people focus on that final scene where innie Mark stays back with Helly instead of leaving with his outie’s wife, Gemma. The fandom’s focus on that sequence makes sense given how dark and complicated it is, but the only reason it happened in the first place is because of an even darker, more impactful scene earlier in the episode. I’m talking about the moment outie Mark finally gets the chance to talk to innie Mark, only to discover that they both kind of hate each other.
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They may technically be the same person, but innie Mark and outie Mark have spent most of the show functioning as two separate protagonists; we’ve always assumed they’d be friends, not foes. It’s devastating to realize that their goals might be irreconcilable, and that neither Mark shares our sympathies for the other. This was the moment that paved the way for innie Mark’s abandonment of Gemma, which set ups what could turn out to be a very dark upcoming third season. For Adam Scott, who plays both Marks, this was one of the strangest acting experiences of his career.
“I have to say it was by far the most insufferable actor I’ve ever worked with … Just such a pain in the a**,” Scott joked to TVInsider about acting out a conversation with himself. “I now know what all my fellow castmates have been putting up with for so long.”
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He later added, more seriously, that the scene was “challenging, but really fun. And we just dove in … It’s the kind of scene that could go wrong, mostly because of performance. It could be really corny, it could take the wrong turns, and I think [the writers] did a beautiful job.”
Creator Ben Stiller was worried the scene might be too confusing
“I mean, the goal was to not get confused,” said director Ben Stiller. “That was my goal in shooting it. I wanted to be able to follow it. It was confusing … I mean, I can’t even imagine as an actor what Adam was having to go through … We were rewriting that scene up until the time we shot it, too.”
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Luckily it turned out fine: It’s easy to remember which one is the innie and which one’s the outie, not just because of the clear back-and-forth editing, but because Adam Scott does a great job subtly establishing the differences between the Marks. In a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Scott explained his process of performing as the two characters:
“We kind of felt from the beginning, Dan [Erickson] and Ben [Stiller] and I, that it should feel like the same guy, but different sections of the same guy. Sort of like how you behave differently if you’re visiting home with your family or if you’re at a party of complete strangers. Everybody has a few different sort of personas you can just throw on at a moment’s notice, and this is sort of that but also sort of not. It’s just the same person so yeah, one of them has had 40-odd years of life experience and joy and sorrow and all the things that go with a full life, and the other one is for all intents and purposes two and a half years old. So was kind of a matter of just subtracting experience or adding experience.”
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Sure enough, there’s definitely a more childlike, innocent quality to innie Mark, although that doesn’t mean one should think of him as a child. (This is the big mistake outie Mark made in the season 2 finale, talking about innie Mark’s romance with Helly in a paternalistic tone.) Innie Mark’s naïve nature made it easier to distinguish him from outie Mark in season 1, but it’s a testament to Scott’s acting that we can still tell them apart even in late season 2, when innie Mark has wisened up a lot to the darkness of the world around him.
The two Marks might be more similar than ever going into season 3, but I think the average “Severance” fan can still tell them apart pretty easily. Helena may have tricked Mark into thinking she was Helly, but outie Mark could never pull the same stunt on us. Solana Token Creator
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