‘What the hell is going on here?’
They’re ready for a waffle party.
“Severance” returns for Season 2 on Apple TV+ on Friday, Jan. 17 — and series stars John Turturro, Britt Lower and Zach Cherry know the answers to some of the show’s mysteries.
“We certainly know some things,” Cherry, 37, exclusively told The Post. “And sometimes I’ll watch the show and go, ‘I didn’t even know that that was what we were doing!’”
The Emmy-winning series is a sci-fi thriller about employees at a mysterious biotech company called Lumon.
Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Lower), Dylan (Cherry) and Irving (Turturro) are all “severed,” which means they have chips in their brains separating their “work” selves (called “innies”) from their regular personas outside of the office (called “outies”). Patricia Arquette plays their sinister supervisor, Harmony Cobel.
At the end of Season 1, it was revealed that Helly’s outie was Helena Eagan, who is in line to be a Lumon CEO. This makes Helly her own worst enemy, since she loathes working there.
Irving also learned that his office love, Burt (Christopher Walken), is married to another man in the outside world. The show is full of mysteries, such as what Lumon is really doing.
“Chris has asked me at times like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” Turturro, 67, told The Post of Walken.
“And I just go, ‘Listen — we’re into each other. Just say your lines to me, and I’ll say my lines to you.’ And sometimes he gets confused with the whole thing.”
The “Big Lebowski” actor added, “But I think it’s weird to start talking about what you’re thinking [is going on in the plot]. I’d rather just receive it from Britt and let her just lay it on me. And then I have to respond to the same thing with Zach, or anyone else.”
Lower, 39, agreed that she doesn’t feel the need to know everything that’s happening.
“Our job as actors is to show up, to be present from the perspective of our characters,” she said. “And that requires being present to the confusion, too.”
Each of the show’s stars has a different approach to playing the innie and the outie of their character.
“We all have different kinds of metaphors for the way that we get into it,” Lower told the Post.
“The metaphor I like to use is that each part of Helly [and] Helena sounds like different music in my head. It’s the same musician, but maybe different albums or sides of an album.”
Turturro said about playing both sides of Irving, “I can relate it to acting sometimes. You’re doing a part, and you’re trying to move your personal life out of the way, concentrate on this imaginary world and get in touch with the child part of you that can imagine things, even if you’ve done all this research or whatever.”
Cherry has a more nature-oriented approach.
“I have always said I like to think of my innie as a squid, and my outie as an octopus,” he explained.
“You know, from a distance, they’re similar. And as you get closer, you start to see that they’re a little different. But then as you get closer, they’re actually the same.”
When Lower and Turturro jumped in to point out that squid and octopus are different, Cherry was unfazed.
“But at a cellular level, at an atomic level, we’re all made of the same things,” he said.
“Severance” Season 2 premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, Jan. 17, with new episodes airing weekly.
