‘I was grieving my mom’: Adam Scott says Severance ‘paralleled my own life’

The Apple TV show stars Scott as a man struggling to cope with the loss of his wife

Adam Scott has reflected on going through his own experience of grief while playing a grieving character in Severance.

The Apple TV drama, which came out February, is set in the world of the “severed”, who have detached their work selves from their home selves.

In it, Scott plays Mark, a man who works at a mysterious company called Lumon and whose wife died in a car accident.

Speaking to The Guardian in a new interview, Scott discussed the fact that he filmed the show in the midst of lockdown and the pre-vaccine pandemic.

He said: “I plopped down in New York, leaving my wife and kids in Los Angeles, and because of the intense quarantine laws it was impossible to go back and forth. So for three or four months I could only see them on FaceTime.

“Also, Mark is grieving his wife and I was grieving my mom, who died a few months before filming. I thought I’d gone through the grieving process, but then I suddenly found myself without my family to cushion the blow.”

He added: “I was either eating and sleeping alone or I was working under the fluorescent lights at Lumon. So that sense of isolation really paralleled my own life. It was a real thing I was feeling and the right place – maybe the only place – to put it was into the show.”

Scott is now back in New York, shooting the second series of Severance. The first season made it onto our list of the best shows of the year, which you can read in full here.