Severance isn’t a car show. Apple TV+’s hit series is a haunting sci-fi drama that’s sometimes funny, sometimes scary, but acutely about its characters. Its close-quarter environments are largely based inside an ominous office building that looks like it was plucked out of the 1970s, though the show takes place in the present-ish. Despite being an intimate human drama that takes place mostly indoors, its car casting is outstanding and has been the talk of The Drive’s office chats since Season 2 began in January. Since we had to know more about the cars of Severance, the show’s prop master Catherine Miller and car supervisor Peter Dancy graciously chatted with us to talk about why and how certain vehicles ended up in the show.
Editor’s Note: For fans of Severance still catching up, don’t worry, there are no consequential spoilers here. If you haven’t been watching, this story should still be an interesting look at how cars are represented in the art of television.
Everything about Severance is disorienting. That’s by design. Its look and feel were meticulously crafted to make the viewer as out of sorts as the characters, and one major way it does so is its car casting. Cars can immediately identify a time period on screen, which is exactly what the producers of Severance didn’t want. Instead, they cast specific cars to help make its temporal setting more ambiguous. In the process, they found some seemingly random but ultimately fascinating and ironically specific automotive characters for the show.
Why are there no modern cars?
“Cars are so integral to a character, a story, they immediately identify time and place [and] world,” Miller told The Drive.
Crafting a specific aesthetic in a show that has essentially two separate worlds, one “innie” world inside the mysterious Lumon building and one “outie” world outside of it, is a complex task. The show’s main characters have their minds split between their work life and outside life, and they’re never allowed to blend the two. So, despite not having cars in the innie world, that’s where the show’s aesthetic design began.
“There was a sense that [the innie] world needed to be very curated and very refined, and harken back to a world where offices were something that companies took pride in, and creating design elements within offices. So we immediately shifted to a slightly retro feel with the innie world,” Miller said.
Showrunner Ben Stiller and Production Designer Jeremy Hindle wanted to carry that aesthetic outside, so the cars needed to be similarly out of time.
“When we got to the outie world we started talking about cars, because obviously cars have to populate any kind of outside world, and there was a sense by Ben and Jeremy that the cars should have a timeless feel to them. They shouldn’t be super modern,” she said. “We want our cars to have a little sense of nostalgia and all of our cars to have a sense that it could be, maybe at any time, and that we weren’t delineating time by what the car was.”
I wondered—was there a cut-off date in terms of the years Miller and Dancy could choose cars from? My editor and I speculated there might be in-show lore regarding why these cars were all older; maybe they all had to be pre-OBDII, for some reason. However, at least as far as Miller and Dancy were willing to admit without spoiling anything, it was all about the look Stiller and Hindle wanted. Cars from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s mostly have clear, sharp lines and angular shapes, which match the vibes of Lumon’s brutalist architecture and, according to our experts, happen to look better on camera.
The makes and models of the cars themselves weren’t really a factor in the car choices from the start (with one exception we’ll get to). In fact, the entire production team went to great lengths to remove all branding and labels from the show. “[It was a] very clear creative choice to not show any branding of any sort,” said Miller. “So even down to the beer that Mark would pull out of the refrigerator. We created those brandings and labels all ourselves. We wanted to have that ability to be out of a time and a place, slightly alternate reality. Some brands just are very defining and defined place and time.”
Instead, it was the cars’ designs and overall vibes that mattered most.
What was the actual process for casting cars?
It all comes down to the script. Writer and creator of Severance, Dan Erickson, crafted a specific world with complex but focused characters. So the script is what ultimately drove the decisions to choose each character’s car.
Selecting the vehicles is ultimately a collaborative effort, but it starts with Dancy, for whom the term “car casting” is almost literal. “To me, that sort of resonates because when I do read a script, I actually put my mind into sort of casting cars for the actor. So it’s like a little bit of a visual figuring out what actor is playing that then most of it is diving into the script and understanding their character a bit. And then sort of car casting. ‘Wow! What kind of car would they be driving with Dylan?’”
In the same way multiple people are often auditioned to play acting roles, Dancy needed to come up with five different car options for each character. Then the production would have to acquire one of each vehicle option and bring it to a stage, where Stiller and the rest of the crew could look at the cars in person. They’d all agonize over each car’s style, how well each car’s body would hold camera rigs, and even the tiniest of details, like their headrest designs.
“Ben and Jessica Lee Gagne, our amazing cinematographer, also, you know, will weigh in about how things could be shot and different angles. And ‘Oh, this! This has a great headrest. We could use that.’ And that’s when the narrowing down starts to happen,” said Miller.
Once a specific car was decided, like Dylan’s minivan, then it was Dancy’s job to go out and get a handful of these cars. There are businesses that provide cars of all kinds to movie productions. Old cars, new cars, cop cars, firetrucks—all sorts of stuff. But that’s not how Dancy found the cars of Severance. Instead, he did so the same way we look for old project cars. Sometimes, he found cars on Facebook marketplace. Other times, he’d see a car on the side of the road that he liked and leave a business card under its windshield wiper to see if its owner was willing to part with it.
“Staying up all night scouring the the Internet,” said Dancy. “I didn’t have Facebook for 20 years, and I had to get it when I started Severance just for the marketplace purposes because the cars I found on Craigslist, man, you don’t want to go there alone.”
But that’s the easy part. The hard part is finding duplicates. Several of them. Dancy would drive between 600 and 700 miles per week, always with his car trailer hitched to the back of his truck, bringing cars back and forth between his home and workshop.
“I live up in New Hampshire, which is about six hours away from New York City. So I go home on the weekends, and I’ll travel down to New York, and you know I would find stuff in Massachusetts that might work that’s in a junkyard, and I’ll pick it up and bring it to our shop in New York, and we’ll paint it, do the body work on it put motor work into it, whatever it really needs.”
And they often need a lot. First, they need to be fixed up so they’re mechanically sound and reliable. Directors aren’t going to be happy if an old Volvo breaks down in the middle of shooting, causing delays and reshoots. But then they have to be made identical. That means paintwork, wheel changes, consistent artificial aging, and even interior upholsteries need to be matched. Dancy does almost all of it, but Miller plays a part in keeping many of the cars’ details identical.
“If we rig a camera on one car, the hood of one car, we might need to be doing an insert [camera shot] in the next setup of another car. So we’ll we’ll just swap the car. So all the dressing inside, you know, the crumpled up napkins. We match those meticulously,” said Miller.
Very few scenes have background cars. Severance is a show about its people, and at least through most of Season 2, it doesn’t do many big shots of the outside world. But it’d be impossible to shoot the entire show without at least a few cars in the background, so those were fastidiously chosen, too.
“If we were at Mark’s apartment complex and you look down the driveways and you see maybe three or four cars in the driveways, those would be cars that we would carry for the whole show, so that we could be meticulous about curating every frame,” Miller said.
You do see one big crowd of background cars—in Lumon’s office parking lot. The lot holds hundreds of cars, but the crew couldn’t keep that many in their stable. So they had about 50 or 60 cars that they’d use to fill the lot practically, then use VFX to digitally add the rest for wider shots. Interestingly, Dancy mentioned it would have been cheaper to use real cars.
Why was each car chosen for its character?
Mark Scout (Adam Scott), the show’s main character, is a safe, sensible guy, so they gave him a ’90s Volvo—a safe, sensible sedan with sharp lines and boxy styling. It also wasn’t lost on the producers that Mark lost his wife to a car accident, so he’d likely want to own a safe car. “We started gravitating, and Ben started gravitating towards this idea of a Volvo. Yeah, you know. We all remember that ad. It’s boxy but safe, and we just kind of gravitated towards that,” said Miller.
Dylan (Zach Cherry) is a family man, so it makes sense that his outie drives a minivan. And since they were going for ’80s and ’90s aesthetics, there’s really only one choice: the original Dodge Caravan. “I do remember that vehicle specifically being a friend of mine’s mom’s vehicle back in like the eighties. I was like, ‘I have to show Jeremy and Cat and Ben this vehicle.’”
“Yeah, every … I think everybody’s mom probably had one of those Dodge [vans],” Miller laughed.
I also asked about the character Devon Scout-Hale (Jen Tullock), Mark’s sister, who drives a classic Range Rover.
“Yeah, I love that car!” said Miller. Devon is the show’s most grounded, most level-headed character, so Dancy and Miller wanted something capable for her. But since she’s also probably one of the wealthier characters in the show, it had to be classy.
“Devon, we wanted something, I feel like, a little bit more high-end for her,” Dancy said.
“Yes, her husband is a writer, a professor, perhaps, and there’s a sense that they lived in a little bit of a nicer home … I think we showed a bunch of cars, but Ben was gravitating towards kind of the SUV,” Miller added.
One of my favorite characters in television at the moment is Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman). The character is vile and sometimes frightening, but Tillman’s performance needs to be shouted about from the rooftops. He’s brilliant. And that brilliance seems to have helped choose his vehicle, as the character wasn’t originally going to be seen driving. We asked if his character’s lonely vibe was what drove the decision to have him ride a motorcycle.
“That’s a great theory. I don’t know where the origin came from,” said Miller. “I think there was a sense of mystery about what his outside life was, and I think either Ben or Dan had this thought that he should be driving a motorcycle, especially because he has so many quick outings.”
For those of you wondering, Milchick’s bike is a custom-built, cafe-racer-style Royal Enfield, and Tillman learned how to ride just for the show.
I also asked: Why give Helena (Britt Lower) the oldest car in the show by far, a 1968 Lincoln Continental? Is there an in-show reason, or was it just vibes? “No, I mean, it’s completely aesthetic,” Dancy said. “So we even went back that far, just because of the aesthetic of that vehicle and the suicide doors. And just it felt right for her character.”
But the best car of Severance isn’t the iconic Continental, Devon’s Range Rover, or even Milchick’s badass bike. Instead, it’s the Mk1 Volkswagen Rabbit, driven by Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette). As one of The Drive’s resident Volkswagen dorks, it tickles me to see that little Rabbit. Not only is it the show’s most charming car, but it was also the most difficult to find.
Dancy was tasked with finding five four-door Rabbits, but they couldn’t be diesel or manual, which most of the surviving U.S.-spec cars are. Film and TV productions don’t like working with diesel engines because they’re loud, and microphones pick up their clatter. Unfortunately for Dancy, finding five gas-powered, automatic Rabbits from the ’80s was an impossible task. So they bought diesels and went through the trouble of swapping gasoline engines in.
I wondered, why go through all that trouble just for one car casting? Why not just choose a different car that’s easier to source? Surely, they could have gotten something like an ’80s Chrysler K car variant for pennies, and they’d all be gas-powered and automatic. But, no, it had to be a Rabbit.
“When everybody saw the VW Rabbit for Patricia Arquette as Cobel, and it was white, the one we happened to bring was white, and everyone was just like that, that is it,” said Miller. “And then also, you know, it’s endowed with the metaphor of a rabbit and a white rabbit.”
But white rabbit metaphors aren’t the real reason it had to be a Rabbit. Production Designer Jeremy Hindle told The Drive that nostalgia drove the decision. “The white Rabbit was my first car, and it is my favorite car of all time. I had a white 1982 VW GTI.”
That little J-turn that Cobel does in season two, episode three, “Who Is Alive?” was actually done by Patricia Arquette, by the way. “Yeah, let me just say Patricia Arquette is a force of nature. We love her, and she does all of her own driving,” said Miller.
“She was great. She would make me nervous a few times, but she had complete control of the vehicle. I mean, I’d be biting my nails a little bit [about] some of the stuff. She made the hard stops, but she had most of her own driving,” Dancy followed.
Ambiguous cars, specifically picked
Like most fans of the show, I was hoping for some deeper meaning behind the choices of these cars and why they’re all older. The Drive team had come up with several of our own theories about the cars being pre-OBDII and how they couldn’t be tracked by modern navigation systems. However, none of that seems to be the case, at least as far as the showrunners are willing to admit.
The cars are there for vibes and aesthetics, and their timelessness is to create a sense of disorientation so that the viewers are just as confused and uncertain as the characters. Any car-related fan theories about seem to be squashed … for now. But what was still fascinating was to get a look into the selection process and learn about how methodically these apparently random cars were picked for the show.
And besides, this show is all about reveals—anything about the cars that we haven’t seen on screen yet could change with a new episode. But for now, the cars of Severance act as part of the show’s wardrobe. They’re extensions of the characters driving them and tools used to build the show’s trademark eeriness. They’re seldom seen in a show that takes place almost entirely in an office building. But when they are seen, few on-screen cars make more of an impact than the cars of Severance.
Got any neat insights about the car casting of a show or movie? Drop us a line at tips@thedrive.com
