This post contains spoilers for the eighth episode of Severance’s second season, “Sweet Vitriol.”Coming into this week’s episode of Severance, the la
This post contains spoilers for the eighth episode of Severance’s second season, “Sweet Vitriol.”
Coming into this week’s episode of Severance, the last we saw of Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel was closer to season two’s beginning, when she was angrily driving away after being denied her elderly job of managing Lumon’s severed floor. We didn’t know where she was headed, or what role she’d go on to play in a season that’s since gone thrillingly off the rails. But “Sweet Vitriol” puts a pause on all of the surrounding action with Mark (Adam Scott) and co. for an eerie, revelatory standalone spotlight on Harmony.
Suddenly isolated from the company that’s defined her since childhood, Harmony returns to her hometown that’s been ravaged by that same company and has failed to recover. She reunites with an elderly flame, Hammond (James Le Gros), as well as her aunt Sissy (Jane Alexander), a true believer whose devout dedication to Lumon helped shape Harmony—for better or worse. Harmony is now seeking leverage, plotting her next step with no clear path in sight. Along the way, we learn that Harmony was the secret “genius” behind the severance chip, designed in grief over the loss of her mother, and that she was a student of Lumon’s founder, Kier, for her entire life.
Directed with chilly intensity by Ben Stiller, this episode was filmed on location in Newfoundland, which only added to the whole Cobel mystique for Arquette (who is also an EP on the series). “We were out in this really far off tundra. It’s really trippy and very rare now to get this experience where you feel the real, true essence of a place, because it’s so cut off,” Arquette tells Vanity Fair. “This old fox house—we were shooting in the real old house that had no insulation, and the wind was whipping through it.”
In learning so much about Harmony—with about a dozen recent questions raised too, no doubt—Oscar and Emmy winner Arquette shines by showing a convoluted recent side of her oft-opaque character. She breaks down what the revelations in “Sweet Vitriol” mean—and what could be next.
Vanity Fair: This episode completely recontextualizes Harmony Cobel for viewers. When did you start to learn about her backstory, and her history with Lumon?
Patricia Arquette: We’ve been talking about a lot of the tendrils of this for a very long time, since early in the first season—maybe even before we started shooting: the mom, and the town, and how it had been ravaged by the industrial waste of early Lumon. These ways of controlling people, which are reflections of things that have happened with other drugs in different parts of the world that we’ve seen operations or government utilize. It was exhilarating to get into all that. Cobel has this learned, acquired coldness and sort of inscrutable quality—and the landscape up there is similar.
It’s kind of a remove too, right? I find that the way you play her, you can never quite pin her down, and then you see her in this place that feels so isolated from anything else. A lot clicks into place.
And as much as this is about science fiction, we still go back as human beings to what were our pivotal early experiences in our life that impacted who we are today. Even her early love affair. We see her really intimate, emotional, interior life.
As you’re revealing so many recent layers of Cobel to the audience, what are some characteristics you wanted to emphasize in your performance?
Her need to shut down is, we see here, where her needs were not met, where she didn’t have a safe and sound place. Even now, she’s in this vigorous with Lumon Corporation, for which she’s constantly trying to prove her value and her worth. Even if she seems cool or disconnected, she is on this Habitrail of constantly trying to get them to recognize her. She keeps getting her security pulled out from underneath her. She’s in trouble. She didn’t do this right. She didn’t do that right. Her aunt is like that. That town is like that. The long-term experience of not getting any acknowledgement—it’s a pattern of trying to throw yourself at somebody who’s never going to recognize you.
The other thing we get revealed to us is how critical she is in the whole Severance development. In religions and things like that, it’s often that you’re not supposed to have your own ego involved. It’s all supposed to be for the glory of the religion, or the corporation; you’re signing a contract saying, “Whatever you think of here while you’re at work, whatever you come up with, we own forever.” But this is her way to say, “You can’t use what I have. I have something that can compel you to treat me better than you are.”
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