Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for Severance Season 2 Episode 8.
Apple TV+‘sSeverancehas been home to a lot of mysteries since its debut, but one character who has remained mysteriously enigmatic — and equally captivating to watch — is Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). First introduced in Season 1 as the manager of the severed floor at Lumon, Ms. Cobel was a thoroughly unpredictable presence, especially when it came to wrangling the Macrodata Refinement employees under her supervision. Although she ends up being fired by Lumon toward the end of the first season, Cobel has clearly set her sights on finding something she can hold over the company in retaliation — and it’s not until Season 2’s latest episode, “Sweet Vitriol,” that we find out exactly what she plans to use as leverage.
This week’s installment ofSeveranceis a shorter standalone episode that follows Cobel to the town of Salt’s Neck, where she grew up. Once home to a booming ether factory, it’s since deteriorated into a shell of itself, with those residents who stayed either strictly adhering to Lumon’s nine core principles — like Cobel’s aunt, Sissy (Jane Alexander) — or resorting to selling ether as a way to get by — like her former “chum,” Hampton (James Le Gros). Although Cobel has the opportunity to confront old ghosts in Salt’s Neck, she also uncovers the original blueprints for the severance procedure, whichshecame up with, contrary to popular belief that Lumon CEO Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry) was the original inventor. It’s a reveal that positions Cobel directly against the company partially responsible for making her who she is today — and might just be the proof she needs as she potentially seeks to team up with a newly reintegrating Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and his sister Devon (Jen Tullock).
Ahead of the premiere of Episode 8, Collider had the opportunity to speak with Arquette about some of the biggest moments of this Cobel-centric installment ofSeverance. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Arquette discusses the experience of filming in Newfoundland, reuniting with herEscape at DannemoradirectorBen Stiller, and how her time onMediumprepared her forSeverance. She also discusses Cobel’s relationships with Sissy and Hampton, what Cobel’s feeling in the scene where she enters her late mother’s room, what Cobel’s thinking in the final moments of the episode, and more.
COLLIDER: You’ve worked with Ben Stiller as a director before, but I’m wondering if there was anything that felt particularly different between working with him on a miniseries like [Escape at]Dannemoraversus reuniting forSeverance.
PATRICIA ARQUETTE: We now have a kind of a shorthand, but there are just a lot more questions altogether, because withDannemora, you know the beginning and you know the end. How we are getting thereexactlyis one thing. But withSeverance, it’s like a whole different world. What is the origin of things? Where can it go?Things are being decided as we move through it.
Patricia Arquette’s Time on ‘Medium’ Prepared Her for ‘Severance’
Does that change anything about your approach and how the two of you work together, or is it fun to not necessarily have all the answers?
ARQUETTE: In a weird way,I go back to my experience onMedium. There is a certain way you have to work in longform TV, and usually, youdon’thave all the answers. There has to be a certain kind of faith and a certain capacity without those answers and just [making] up your own answers as you move through things. Sometimes, those turn out to be great, and sometimes, they turn out to be wrong. So, there’s that part of it. In a way, I had a lot more experience than Ben did in that kind of unrelenting way of, “Here you go! Now you need the next season.” And Dan [Erickson], too. He’s very much a novice at all of this. This is a whole new terrain for him, which is exciting, but just in the nuts and bolts of it, [it’s] new and daunting and intense in what is expected of him.
We’ve gotten bits and pieces of what Cobel’s upbringing was like, and we get even more of it in Episode 8. Did you have conversations with Dan about filling in those backstory gaps ahead of time?
ARQUETTE: With Season 1, early on, I was given thatI’d grown up in this town that was very impacted by Kier and Lumon, and that I’d gone to the school, and that my mother was an ether addict. Then, I started at school and there was this ether factory in town that kind of loomed large, and it environmentally destroyed this town. I’d already had all of that from the first season, but it was nice to be able toseethe school, see the world, see the beginning. There were times when we were going to be in the building of the school a lot more than we ended up doing. It’s funny, too, because sometimes the writers will write those things out, and you don’t end up going there because it costs too much to build this whole giant set, but then that inhabits a whole place in your mind to fill in the blanks.
There’s this whole other world. Within this world, there are a lot of layers of memories that now, I have. Aunt Sissy had been a part of it, who raised her. I don’t know that Aunt Sissy hadalwaysbeen a part of it, actually. But last year, when we started talking about this person, we ended up getting Jane Alexander, which was so exciting to us. Also, this character of Hampton, because in a weird way, Sissy never really can see anyone for who they are. She is so rigid in her view of everyone and everything that nobody can actually exist in front of her, purely.Hampton is the only person who’s ever really seen who Cobel is.
Patricia Arquette Explains the History Between Cobel and Hampton on ‘Severance’
I did want to ask about your interpretation of that relationship because, in the episode, it feels like childhood sweethearts, but was that more subtext or was it a bit more explicit in the script? How did you approach the dynamic between Cobel and Hampton, who clearly have such a big history?
ARQUETTE: I think it was childhood sweethearts. That’s what we had talked about, too, with Ben in those days. There was a childhood sweetheart kind of memory thing going on. Oddly enough,I’ve known James [Le Gros] since I was a teenager. I’d always really wanted to work with him, so I was excited to work with him, but there is that little vein of, “We know the same kind of worlds as each other.” Then, to be up there in such a specific place, Newfoundland, it’s so strange. It’s so cut off from the world that it really is its own time warp. You still have that brogue from the turn of the century when all the Irish fishermen moved over there, which also leads into this Harmony Cobel sound. It starts to come together in this weird way.
Salt’s Neck really is a “ghost town,” this place that was once this big factory town and has since become abandoned and a shell of itself. What was the experience like, filming there? It doesn’t just provide more of a sense of what this world is like and the effect that Lumon has had on this town, but it also fills in the gaps about who Cobel used to be.
ARQUETTE: Very much so.The terrain of that place is the terrain of her family, her actual family. The coldness… It’s not warm. It’s not a safe place. It’s a hard, cold, dangerous place. We’d be there talking to each other and an iceberg would float by. You’d order a bowl of fried cod tongues. There’s leftover food from before you could really depend on the food chain, so it’s like beef that’s packed in just salt for nine months. There are all these strange things. There are really interesting festivals that they have, they have weird musical instruments that they’ve created themselves. It’s really fascinating to be up there, and you do see these wrecks of towns. You see this industrial world, how the Industrial Revolution impacted different areas when that huge wave passed through.
In this instance, it feels like the wave is Lumon, in the world ofSeverance,and then this is what’s left in its wake: people that the ether mill has kind of churned up and spit out.
ARQUETTE: I’ve been in Detroit, like 20 years ago… you see the burned-out carcass of what the auto industry left behind in its wake, or all these industries that are going to do that now. It’s a bit of the story of those relationships and those places. I think Lumon has gone on and been very successful in many, many ways in many, many places, and maybe they don’t impact towns quite as obviously as that, but they still do. It’s interesting to me, too, becauseether is, in a way, the forgetting drug.
‘Severance’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: Come and Tame These Tempers
“Harmony Cobel. Well, flip my toboggan.”
You referenced Cobel’s mother, and we do get a hint of her story in Season 1 — because Cobel has the breathing tube as part of her Kier shrine and has brought it with her to Sissy’s house. The scene where she goes into her mother’s room, which also seems to be the place where her mother passed, and then plugs the breathing tube back in, feels like she’s tapping into a very specific core memory for herself. What thoughts did you have while playing that scene, and what kind of emotion is Cobel experiencing, being back in that space?
ARQUETTE: All of that is true.It’s a very cold place, a lot of intense memories for her. I think by the time her mom came back, though, she didn’t really want to be under Sissy’s thumb. It’s very hard to watch someone you love be caretaken by somebody who hates them. There’s a lot of disdain in her experience of dying. I think there’s a part of Cobel’s mom that is very much present in her. We get certain qualities from our parents. For better or for worse, we model them. The question-of-authority part of her mom, her mom’s rebellion, she has within her too, and that place. It’s like every memory… her mom’s free wild spirit being extinguished day by day by her aunt, by her illness, by this cold place, and [Cobel] never really got to have the mothering that a kid should have anyway. There’s a lot of organizations that took kids from when they were very little or made them labor when they were children or didn’t let their parents raise them, and who are indoctrinating them early on, and that’s kind of the case with Lumon. She’s one of the early experiments of that.
So, there’s just so much longing that she had for her mom. That closure she never got to have, that whole relationship she never got to have. Deep under there, there’s this keening, this, again, old-fashioned, ancient thing that we have had as human beings, from civilization to civilization,that mourning sound that we have for people that we love, and that we let go. I’ve certainly had that experience.
Patricia Arquette on What That Big ‘Severance’ Reveal Means for Cobel’s Fight Against Lumon
To hear you talk about rebellion, too, brings me to the revelation at the end of this episode about how Cobel seems to have been the one to have invented severance, and the chip, and the overrides, everything that [Lumon CEO] Jame Eagan ultimately took credit for. She confronts this part of her past, but then she also finds what she’s been looking for, which is proof that Lumon can’t really deny. Did that reveal recontextualize anything for you about the character and your perception of her, especially the knowledge that she was this bright young woman who came up with this huge invention that someone else claimed credit for?
ARQUETTE: We’ve been talking about that for a while, playing around with these different kinds of ideas. But there’s something in this group think, this corporate think, where you serve and are good, and it’s not about the individual, whether that’s the military or corporations or whatever. As a woman, “Know your place.” There are languages that we’ve developed even as a species to talk about this phenomenon whereyou’re supposed to just serve the greater good or the larger principle. So, that was the religious life she’d grown up with, was being humble, “Don’t take credit for these things, this is for the glory of Kier.” So she kind of went along with that, and she did get bits of more power or more respect, or however she saw that, or success, or her own place in this organization, but it never wasreallywhat it was.
She was working on that with a bunch of people who were trying to work on that, because it had been one of Kier’s concepts, but they weren’t able to make that breakthrough, whereas she was able to come up with this. She also never got that kind of acknowledgment. Her mom wasn’t really around, her aunt wasn’t going to give it to her.Nobody’s really going to ever give her the approval that she’s been seeking her whole life, and she continues to seek. Nobody’s giving her the love that she longs for in some kind of way, the approval that she wishes she could have, but it’s really all she knows, this giant, broken, and complicated organization. But she is proud of herself inside, and I think she also does have a lot of what she considers righteous anger about what she is contributing and how that is just constantly being belittled and how she’s not being treated with any kind of respect.
In the scene where you see Cobel driving away, what is she potentially prepared to do in that moment about Lumon? Has she made up her mind about how she’s going to go back and potentially confront them in some way, or at least have more leverage now?
ARQUETTE: Here’s the thing: all of the bridges are burned. Cobel has nothing to lose here. She’s going to attempt to use her wiles and come up with some strategy and try to manipulate this situation as best she can, butthe dangerous thing is that she’s got nothing to lose.
