Severance star Patricia Arquette provides one of the show’s most fascinating and mysterious characters as Harmony Cobel. Deposed of her management position following season one, Cobel returns and gives the audience new information about Lumon Industries and its mysterious severance procedure. However, there’s still so much to uncover, and Patricia Arquette enjoys every second as Cobel evolves. Here, in an interview with The Contending, she not only has thoughts on her character’s trajectory, but she also has thoughts on the rest of the cast as well, even if she won’t give all the details.
The Contending: One of the big reveals this season is that Cobel invented the severance program. Now, many people have looked back over the first season and moments in the second season and re-contextualized a lot of scenes of her. Was this knowledge you had since the beginning and did it play a role in your performance?
Patricia Arquette: I didn’t know that she had done everything, but that she was very instrumental in the whole system that they were working with. Cobel has very much been involved, and has many other plans that Lumon hasn’t necessarily signed off on. She has her own vision of how to serve Kier best. But yes, we had talked about when she was in school and what a good student she was and that she had won all these awards, and just that she was instrumental in severance from the beginning.
The Contending: It’s great that you brought up that she has her own view of what you want with Kier, because now we have a lot more information. You reference in a previous interview that Cobel has nothing to lose and is willing to burn it all down. But I could see her joining the “good guys” and launching a revolution, and I could also see her personally trying to take the chip out of Gemma’s head and using it for her own purposes. So with a character that has so much open-ended about her and we don’t know what she’s thinking, I’m curious how you get into her mind?
Patricia Arquette: I think if you looked at her astrologically you would say she’s a Gemini. She’s like two people with these opposing views inside her so she’s incredibly confusing, and you don’t know which one of her is in the room at what time. She’s going by her own logic that we really don’t understand. I think some of that comes from the trauma she had growing up alone, you keep a lot of things close to the vest. I feel like it could go either way too with her. As a viewer I feel like that, and I feel like that when I’m playing Cobel. I feel she still has a really strong connection to Lumon and wants certain things from them, and could manipulate and create a certain relationship with them moving forward. Or she could support Mark and these guys, as a punishment to Lumon.
The Contending: Cobel’s interaction with Lumon this year was with Helena (Britt Lower), and what I loved about those sequences is that Cobel has a degree of power and she even has a bit of contempt for Helena, and that she was born into her position and hasn’t really earned it. Yet Cobel has a healthy level of fear and what Helena represents in Lumon. How did you guys approach those scenes?
Patricia Arquette: Yeah, I totally agree with you. In the first season Cobel has this tantalizing part of her that has an almost like hero worship for Helena because she’s an Eagan. So when Helena underwent the severance program and was Helly R, there was a fear that she would hurt herself on Cobel’s watch, and Cobel never asked for this, and felt it was a bit showy for her taste to begin with. Then Helly was a real handful and created a lot of problems in Cobel’s department and brought about a lot of scrutiny on Cobel that she didn’t need. So there is a lot of history and resentment that really built up between her towards Helena.
Then, in these conversations this season, Helena is so entitled that she is actually dangerous, and I think she also makes Cobel upset because she does not acknowledge at all, and neither does the whole company, what Cobel has done. If you look throughout history all of these big companies steal ideas from everybody. Even now you sign contracts that, if you invent something in a certain space, it belongs to the corporation. With Cobel there’s also this indoctrination that she shouldn’t get credit that is supposed to go to Kier. That it is almost unseemly to even want your own credit. So there’s this weird thing between her and Helena that Cobel can’t say to her, you know, I created all of this and you guys owe me or you should be more respectful towards me. Because that’s a weird pride that is looked down upon as well in this organization. But also Helena is very dangerous, this company has gotten rid of people. Cobel herself has drilled into people’s heads for them so, it takes one to know one, I guess.
The Contending: Yet despite all of the complexities there and her distrust of many people, she does seem to have a genuine liking of Mark. To protect or at least give something to him. Have you thought about what it is that she sees in Mark that she wants to aid him?
Patricia Arquette: Yes, but I’m not telling you. That has been very important, and there’s been a lot of conversation with Ben (Stiller) and me and his direction towards that.
The Contending: So we’ll get to that eventually. Excellent! We got to see her have a character that she took some comfort in; it was Hampton, this season in the episode Sweet Vitriol. I love their dynamic because you can tell she is mad at him for not escaping the town, and he is mad at her for leaving, and they have all this antagonism and yet in the end they can’t stop themselves from helping the other. What was it like getting those sequences to work?
Patricia Arquette: I think she is upset with him because in a subconscious way she looks at him as a loser. He didn’t use his smarts and his wits to get out of this drag of a town, he is still huffing and selling ether. I think he is one of the funniest and sharpest people she has ever known and I think he is her first love. I think they have a beautiful and sad past with teenage love and things that happen in that circumstance. So it’s meaningful when she sees him, and it is meaningful that he shows up for her even though he hates her and has been hurt by her. There’s a lot of bad blood but he also protects her, and she really doesn’t have a lot of people doing that. There was a moment in time where I felt like she thought that she and Milchick were on the same team. Not as lovers, but she has been looking for that kind of integrity or support in a relationship for her whole life. So it is very meaningful to her to have somebody on her side, and it really hurts her when it feels like somebody is not.
The Contending: That even goes back to the way Lumon treated her. She thought they were on her side.
Patricia Arquette: Yeah, exactly.
The Contending: In filming the episode “Sweet Vitriol,” it is the first concrete backstory we are given of Cobel. We meet her aunt, who is completely indoctrinated into Lumon, and the town that she’s lived in is even worse off than it was when she was there. Did knowing that backstory change any way you looked at Cobel?
Patricia Arquette: I did know about the town and Lumon’s ether factory and the poisoning that it had done. That it was Lumon’s first test town, and what she comes back to is the wasted discard, the part of the test that didn’t work. I also think as much as Harmony would like to run away and not deal with her aunt and claim they are nothing alike, Harmony has absorbed that indoctrination and that love of Kier. Her aunt has influenced her perception of people and her viewpoint of the world. What is appropriate and what isn’t appropriate is very much informed by her aunt. I think in a weird way they do love each other and see themselves in each other. Harmony doesn’t have that with her mother.
The Contending: Final thoughts?
Patricia Arquette: I think Helena is also a Gemini. I would say Mr. Milchick is a Leo, and Mark is maybe a Virgo.
Severance streams exclusively on AppleTV+.
