‘Severance''s Jeremy Hindle on evoking beauty and violence through design

It is an irony not lost on Severance’s Emmy-nominated production designer Jeremy Hindle that many people wish their offices looked a bit more like the ones he designed – despite the horrors that unfold there.

“This is the Severance thing. It’s creating a space that’s still beautiful. Strangely, you want to go there,” says Hindle. 

Created by Dan Erickson, produced and directed by Ben Stiller, Apple TV+’s Severance takes place in a world where people can be ‘severed’ by coroporation Lumon. Their work selves become disconnected from their personal ones; creating two people – an ‘innie’ and an ‘outie’. The show focuses on Mark Scout, played by Adam Scott, with Britt Lower as his co-worker Helly and Dichen Lachman as his wife Gemma. 

Season two filmed at York Studios in the Bronx, and on location across New York, New Jersey, and partly in Newfoundland from 2022 through 2024 with breaks for the SAG and WGA strikes. It required Hindle’s design to expand beyond Lumon and the town of Keir into the wider world.

”For me, the most terrifying [thing to design] was the outside world,” says Hindle. It had to be relatable, but still retain the show’s outset tenet of ’where they hell are they?’

Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and Adam Scott; Source: Apple TV+

To achieve this, Hindle’s designs worked so “if [the innies] ever got to the outside world and explained to somebody what they were doing, it had to make no sense. But [the audience] had to see that everything worked.”

Just as the characters are in the dark, so are the viewers. It is design that breaks the fourth wall. “That was intentional,” Hindle says.

The duality of colour

“When Ben [first] sent me the script I did a look book, and the first page was the snow from [Coen brothers’] Fargo on the parking lot. I was like, ‘I think the outside should always be cold and snowy and lonely’.”

That this visually unites the outie world with Lumon’s stark white walls was a happy accident. “It wasn’t necessarily my intention to [connect them]. At the time I didn’t think about it like that. It’s amazing how the mind can put those pieces together.”

In addition to linking themes, “colours create an emotional response more than anything. You [the viewer] start to feel like you’re with them in this emotional way.”

Hindle’s next colour pick was green. “I always thought of green as nature - which makes you calm. You’re putting people in this huge white room, but the green has some way of making you feel comfortable.”

Dichen Lachman as Gemma in Severance; Source: Apple TV+

Season two’s addition was red, which evokes both anger and love. Gemma in the red dress in Lumon’s ‘Christmas Room’, where she is forced to write endless thank you cards. Red also makes a bold appearance in the final scene where Hindle wanted red to evoke love.

Hindle also juxtaposed cruelty and beauty. “I wanted to make [Gemma’s room] slightly violent. The little table she sits at as a triangle. It’s sharp at the edge. There’s things that feel slightly scary in the room.”

Location, location, location

Hindle tasked the locations team with finding a version of the Farnsworth House – a glass building in Illinois – that also had subterranean space where the Eagans, Lumon’s uber-wealthy owners, lived. Supervising location manager Ryan Smith found the Taghkanic Glass House in upstate New York, which not only featured 360-degree glass exposure, but also an underground private abode.

His design inspiration was: “when you start to become so wealthy that only the absurd becomes attractive to you.

“At first I thought about them only having Memphis furniture,” Hindle says, but with decorator David Schlesinger they picked pieces like the John Pomp rift table to hint at the fractured relationships within the home.

Michael Siberry and Britt Lower in 'Severance'; Source: Apple TV+

Another new location in season two is Gemma and Mark’s home in episode seven’s flashbacks. Hindle suggested filming in cinematographer and diretor Jessica Lee Gagné’s rental home. Design wise, “they’re surrounded by books. Every kind of colour, the warmest environment – everything opposite of Lumon.”

For the goat room, Hindle filmed on a golf course. “I wanted big rolling hills that we could build our tent over and light so it would look like it was underground.” Why not build it on a soundstage? Hindle simply says, “you wouldn’t be able to.”

“Artificial grass looks obviously looks fake. If you do real grass [indoors] it dies in a few days. It had to be outside. I wanted it to look real and gnarly, not like Teletubby lawn.”

This fits into the core theme: create something beautiful. Lumon, after all, wouldn’t go for astroturf. And, “Dan writes these amazing words - like ’mammalian’. This room had to be absurd instantly because of the word. [As a designer] you can’t help it.”

Gwendoline Christie, Britt Lower and Adam Scott in Severance's 'Goat Room'; Source: Apple TV+

Choreography and Merriment

“When I first designed the [main office] floor, I thought ‘how do I make a playground?’ It was by making it interactive, so I always wanted to be able to spin the desk.” Season one didn’t provide the requisite story. On season two, “the chance came up for a three [sided desk] and I was like ‘It looks like a merry-go-round. I have to spin this one.’”

Once they’d figured it out, Hindle didn’t know when it might be used. Then, they got the script for the final episode: “When using a marching band came up, I was like ‘Oh my god, we can finally spin it.’

“Part of [production] design is to keep making these things so that they’re available when something happens. This was not something you could, on the day, be like ‘You know it would be great if this could spin.’ It won’t happen, it took two months.”

Hindle’s prescience isn’t so much a knack as a carefully honed skill. “It’s trying to be a proactive designer. We need to think about everything really far in advance for things that aren’t even in scripts. We just keep making up designs that I think would be useful at some point in the story, so they’d be ready to go. And then, when the right idea is there, they connect.”

This story also appears on our sister site Screen