How Patricia Arquette plays a villain even as she keeps tabs on humanity

When Patricia Arquette was preparing to shoot “Severance,” she had myriad questions about the show’s internal logic and the mysteries that would only slowly be unpacked (if at all) over its first season. But none of that was her greatest concern. “Maybe for each of [the actors] in our own way,” she says, “it was more like, ‘Yeah, this thing will work, but am I going to be the person who f— it up? Is this tone too much? Not enough? Is what I’m doing working, or is this insane?’”

The 54-year-old Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress needn’t have worried: She, like the rest of the ensemble, expertly executed a precise balance of dark comedy and quiet dread, visceral suspense and crushing pathos. Nominated for supporting actress in a drama, Arquette is taking a quick break from directing her first feature — an adaptation of Cheryl Della Pietra’s novel “Gonzo Girl” — to reflect on what, exactly, she got herself into when she signed up for this seductive, unsettling Apple TV+ brain-bender.

In it, she plays Harmony Cobel, an unsmiling middle manager at Lumon Industries, a sinister corporation that has invited its workforce to undergo “severance,” a medical procedure that separates employees’ office memories from their home lives. On the job, Cobel browbeats the timid new head of Macrodata Refinement, Mark (Adam Scott), and then out in the real world, she continues closely monitoring him, going undercover as his seemingly harmless, overly friendly next-door neighbor Mrs. Selvig.

When executive producer Ben Stiller, who directed a majority of the first season’s episodes, approached Arquette, he gave her only creator Dan Erickson’s pilot “and Cobel’s hardly in it.” But she put her trust in Stiller, with whom she’d co-starred in the 1996 indie comedy “Flirting With Disaster,” and teamed up again for the 2018 Showtime limited series “Escape at Dannemora,” which he directed.

“He spends so much time thinking through each thing and how he wants it to feel and look,” she says of working with her friend on “Severance.” “He’s very clear, so that was really helpful.” She adds, laughing, “I know he knew what he was doing, even though I didn’t know what he was doing.”

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Where many of her castmates were wrestling with playing roles that were, in essence, split personalities — one life at the Lumon offices, one life back home — Arquette got to dig into a villain who herself is slyly playing another character. “As Selvig, Cobel knows what she knows about human beings and their behavior and subconscious triggers,” notes Arquette. “Her decision is to make [Selvig] a fumbling, bumbling, auntie type — someone who [Mark is] not really worried about.”

In a sense, Arquette was likewise drawing from her own observations of human nature to capture Cobel’s chilly, autocratic demeanor. Specifically, she thought of the sleek tech offices she’s visited. “I’ve done speaking engagements, and I’ve toured through those: ‘Oh, here’s our pinball machine room …’ They feel very artificial — I don’t know, it’s weird.” But she also did research into “cults and armies and different structures where they give you a little, and then take away a bunch.”

The show’s suffocating paranoia was felt acutely during shooting, which took place in the early, anxious months of COVID-19. This was before vaccinations, requiring the cast to be separated from each other, and although the producers followed careful protocols, there was still risk involved. “We had this scene where I have to scream in [co-star Sydney Cole Alexander’s] face, and I was like, ‘I’m so scared to yell in this beautiful young woman’s face. What if I got her sick?’ It added a whole different dimension. Never in acting have [I thought] I could really injure [my co-star] because of what’s happening in the world. There was just so many levels of ‘I want to be close to somebody, and I’m scared to be close to anybody.’”

Arquette’s fraught reminiscences bring to mind one of the show’s troubling themes, which is whether it would ever be worthwhile to literally cordon off your home and work selves. For actors, that question is particularly intriguing because of the emotional demands their roles impose on them.

“Pretty much, I leave it there,” Arquette says of her job. “On ‘The Act,’ before each scene I was like, ‘I’m so sorry this lady did these terrible things to her daughter — sorry, Joey [King].’ I would just leave it there and go bike riding, and we’d go to dinner and laugh.” But there are exceptions. “With ‘Escape at Dannemora,’ there was a low-grade depression that I felt [that character] had — that was hard to get rid of,” she says. “My movie ‘The Wannabe,’ which I really wasn’t crazy at all about the ultimate cut, I was playing this woman that I decided was suicidal subconsciously. That was the hardest thing to ever get away from — not [that I was] feeling suicidal, but it was really intense and scary.”

As Arquette waits for Season 2 scripts, she’s focused on “Gonzo Girl,” but she’s also worried, seeing in “Severance” a metaphor for the way powerful institutions insinuate themselves in our lives — often without much resistance. A longtime activist for gender equality, she got her first job working at Planned Parenthood; just weeks after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, Arquette wonders about the fight ahead.

“You can get conditioned — you can lose the desire to fight,” she warns. “A friend of mine was just in Ukraine and talking about Russia and how, especially outside of Moscow or St. Petersburg, there’s sort of an acceptance now after so many decades of this way of governance.

“I just get so frustrated with people [in our country],” she continues. “This was my great fear in 2016: what was going to happen with the Supreme Court. I tried to make people aware: ‘All the things that you’re going to want are going to get knocked down by the same Supreme Court you’re going to let in.’

“But the amount of people that are on board with this stripping of civil rights — women being treated like their bodies [are] property of the state, even crime victims — it’s unbelievable to me. It does feel like we’re living in a bit of a nightmare now. And I am very afraid of what this says about our country and our humanity.”