SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 4 of “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
“Severance” fans are used to the confined office walls and hallways that serve as the only home for the severed employees inside Lumon. But right away, the latest episode of Season 2, “Woe’s Hollow,” changes the landscape completely.
That becomes clear when Irving (John Turturro) wakes up completely alone on a giant slab of ice in the middle of nowhere. He soon comes across fellow employees Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Helly (Britt Lower) — secretly Helena, her outie — as they traverse snowy and icy forests on a mysterious work retreat organized by Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman).
Production designer Jeremy Hindle, who also worked on the first season along with “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” describes “Woe’s Hollow” as the most challenging episode of the season, because they shot all the exteriors on location. He spent around 20 days hiking with scouts in upstate New York at different elevations, ultimately deciding on locations like Awosting Falls for the waterfall-set climax and the Minnewaska State Park Preserve for the tent and trekking scenes.
“The goal was to find all these different locations that were visually really different so it looked like they’d walked a long way,” Hindle tells Variety. “When scouting, you’re going out for full days where you just hike and hike because a lot of these areas weren’t accessible by car. In certain areas, you had to hike for five miles to see it and realize, ‘We can’t [actually] get there.’”
Hindle says the changing weather conditions were a “nightmare” for finding locations they could feasibly film in. “We got the most mind-blowing amount of snow at the beginning of the shoot, and then it all got really hot and melted and we were shooting with zero snow,” he recalls. The crew used machines to ice up the trees and place snow on the ground for the actors walk on, with around 70% of the snow in the final cut having to be CGI.
But the crew won out when shooting Irving’s dream sequence, featuring him in a Lumon office set-up perched on top of a steep mountain, filmed day-for-night in a burned forest around Sam’s Point. “Luckily, it just pounded snow. We shot it in an afternoon for real with this beautiful desk in the middle of this crazy field. It almost looks like it’s underwater — we were trying to create something that was really surreal.”
Irving’s dream scene isn’t the only touch of Lumon in this episode, as the severed employees are initially greeted by a television screen, in which Milchick lays out their mission at Woe’s Hallow. The tents also glow blue with “a little bit of luminance … The idea is almost that everything’s within Lumon, whether it’s in the building or outside.”
While the episode features vast snowy landscapes and trees, the scale gets notably smaller with the major turning points for intimate character relationships — mainly as Irving starts to question Helena’s motives. One memorable moment is the sex scene between Mark and Helena, set inside a tent with a strong red backlight.
“I wanted the inside of the tents to feel like a cage, almost like the ribs of an animal,” Hindle says. “We built this beautiful heater in the tent that was really just a light source. It looks like one of those ‘60s, ‘70s radiant heaters, everything has a Dieter Rams look to it. There’s red only a few times [in the show], whenever there’s a bit of real love.”
Notably, Episode 4 also marks the first time that many of the severed employees are seeing and interacting with the outside world for the first time. This was an additional consideration for the production design team.
“We do treat them like kindergarten children,” Hindle says. “They’ve never seen outside, they’re never seen the sky, a tent or fire. Like when they see fire for the first time, it’s amazing — they’re like ‘Ooh!’ So the attention to detail in every one of those moments had to be perfect for us, because while the characters are taking it in, the whole audience is doing the same thing.”
Safety parameters were also a major component of filming. Since the forests are protected by the US Forest Service, and are home to insects and animals, they couldn’t actually touch any of the trees or move things around. The intense finale sequence in which Irving dunks Helena into the water to get her to unveil her true identity, for example, required additional rocks to be built and blended in with the natural scenery.
Hindle credits “everybody bringing their game big time” with pulling off the episode despite harsh and unpredictable weather conditions. Looking back on “Woe’s Hollow,” he says, “I did practically make everyone go to the end of the world.”