{"id":112053,"date":"2025-08-26T19:59:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T19:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/112053\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T19:59:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T19:59:09","slug":"ben-stiller-says-not-everything-in-severance-means-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/112053\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Stiller Says Not Everything in Severance Means Something"},"content":{"rendered":"

Across its two-season run, Severance has routinely confounded its audience \u2014 questions such as \u201cWhat\u2019s up with the goat guy?<\/a>\u201d and \u201cWhy does Irving B. see the black gooey substance so frequently<\/a>?\u201d fill up the show\u2019s sub-Reddits. That aspect of the fandom initially took Ben Stiller, Severance\u2019s executive producer and primary director, by surprise. When he was first producing the show, those sorts of mystery-box elements were not the preoccupations that Stiller expected from its audience; he was much more attuned to Severance\u2019s tone and emotional stakes.<\/p>\n

After the success of season one, which left many of the most important questions unanswered, Stiller was well aware that a second season without definitive revelations would risk disappointing Severance\u2019s rabid fanbase. During a recent appearance on our podcast Good One, Stiller discussed that audience dynamic. Some of the fan theories, he explained, may be unfounded: Sometimes a green carpet is just a green carpet. Here\u2019s an excerpt from their conversion, which you can watch in full above.<\/p>\n

Jesse David Fox: It was clear after season one that a lot of people were very invested in the mystery aspects of the show. How much do you personally care about that element?
Ben Stiller: I care that people care, so I don\u2019t not care about it. It\u2019s important to people, and I understand that because nobody wants to feel like you\u2019re just making it up as you go along. But for me, I was a little bit surprised at how drawn in people were by that. I\u2019m more into the feeling of the place, the tone, the humor, and definitely the weirdness of it.<\/p>\n

Going into the mammalian scene, for example, was scary for me because I felt like, Oh, we\u2019re expanding the believability of the world here. I care a lot about that and making sure that whatever reality you\u2019re creating, there\u2019s enough of a grounding in some sort of identifiable reality that you believe it, even if it\u2019s really weird or comedic. That was scary to me because all of a sudden it\u2019s like, Okay, these people are different and they\u2019re kind of feral and they\u2019re living off the land, and yet they\u2019re in this room that\u2019s off a hallway, so how do you believe that? So when casting the mammalian people, we really tried to make sure that we were going for something that would be somewhat believable, even though it\u2019s so crazy and absurd that they\u2019re in this room doing that. I was scared because if we don\u2019t buy this, then we\u2019re going to get outside of the reality of believing in the rest of the show.<\/p>\n

Has audience feedback made you more focused on the mystery aspect than you might\u2019ve been otherwise?
Yeah. It\u2019s interesting to see what people connect with. Some people connect with the relationships \u2014 Mark and Helly or Mark and Gemma. And some people are just not as into that stuff and are more into what the numbers mean. It\u2019s great that people are connected to the big mysteries of it, but I do think ultimately you watch a show because you want to feel something, you want to be emotionally connected to the things that we can relate to in our own interactions with other people, be it feelings of love or loss. Those are the core elements of what the show is about and was always on my mind.<\/p>\n

What do blue and green mean on the show?
Honestly, I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t sit around and talk about those thematic ideas. When we were creating the office, we had to decide on the color of the carpet. We\u2019re going to be living with this carpet for many years, if the show goes on. I\u2019d never made a series before. So I thought, Let\u2019s make sure we like this color green. But then it becomes the world that we live in.<\/p>\n

I will say, you have to look at the introduction of a new color in our very controlled palette and go, Okay, that has to feel intentional. Like the red that comes in at the end of season two feels to me like a new idea. Red can mean a lot of different things, but it\u2019s both. Obviously there\u2019s love with red, but it can also mean emergency. That was fun to really play with at the end because I knew it was going to feel different. But I wouldn\u2019t ever pretend to say blue represents this or that. It\u2019s instinctual for me mostly.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s just a nice shade.
\n Photo: Apple TV+\n <\/p>\n

There are a lot of fan theories about the colors, so I\u2019m sure they are going to pick apart your answer, thinking you are hiding something.
You don\u2019t want to tell everybody everything, but I\u2019m not going to pretend that I\u2019m smarter than I am.<\/p>\n

My theory is ultimately Severance is about the integration of all versions of oneself. Have you ever felt not integrated?
Yes, there have been times when I\u2019ve felt out of balance. Honestly, I feel like life is about trying to find that balance. At first you have to be aware that you\u2019re out of balance. Over the years, there were times where I wasn\u2019t as self-aware. When I was younger, I just went off of instinct. I didn\u2019t really understand why. Over the years I\u2019ve been out of balance at times, personally, in relationships, marriage, work, all of those. Now I feel I have a better understanding of, Wait a minute, something doesn\u2019t quite feel right. I want to try to fix that.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really hard. When you\u2019re going through life, sometimes you\u2019re just trying to survive, literally just trying to get through the next day no matter what\u2019s going on in your life. Sometimes if you\u2019re lucky enough to not have to worry about going out and getting food every day and you have a home and all these things, then it opens up all these other conundrums to you of what is this all about? Ultimately the creative process has to be about, What is it I want to say and why do I want to say it? I don\u2019t pretend to understand all of that, but I do have more of a sense of understanding what\u2019s important for me to have in my life that feels connected.<\/p>\n

And it can\u2019t just be the creative. It also has to be my relationships and my life with my friends and my wife and my kids. That feels more integrated to me now than it has. I got to this point in 2017, after Zoolander 2,\u00a0of having a little bit more of a sense of, Oh no, I want to make something purely because I want to have this thing exist. I want to see it. I want to bring it into existence. That\u2019s the main voice that you have to listen to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Across its two-season run, Severance has routinely confounded its audience \u2014 questions such as \u201cWhat\u2019s up with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[10546,73258,15819,236,33730,1036,88,19664,73259,13021,92],"class_list":["post-112053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-awards","tag-awards-season","tag-ben-stiller","tag-celebrities","tag-chat-room","tag-comedy","tag-entertainment","tag-gold-rush","tag-good-one-podcast","tag-severance","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}