Severance has become the most popular show on Apple TV+, and it’s no surprise. Each episode has details that make the show unique – and believe it or not, that includes the cars we see in it. In an interview with The Drive, Severance creative consultants Catherine Miller and Peter Dancy detailed the difficult task of choosing the cars for the show.
As detailed in the report, everything in Severance is designed to be “disorienting” as the show has no clear timeline and everything from the sets and costumes is chosen to “help make its temporal setting more ambiguous.” And although Severance isn’t a show about cars, it’s hard to avoid them, so the team needed people to cast specific vehicles.
“Cars are so integral to a character, a story, they immediately identify time and place [and] world,” Miller told The Drive. According to her, showrunner Ben Stiller and production designer Jeremy Hindle wanted the cars in the show to have a “timeless feel” and that they “shouldn’t be super modern.”
Although the cast drive real cars, they’re all modified to have any marks and labels removed. “Some brands just are very defining and defined place and time,” said Miller. This also applies to other objects in the show, such as household appliances or even drinks and food. “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.”
When it comes to casting vehicles, Dancy explains that he had to put his mind to choosing the car that best suits each actor. Dancy had to come up with five different car options for each character. Then the production had to acquire each one and bring them to the stage so that Stiller and the crew could choose the best cars.
Finding the right cars for Severance
Of course, since the cars seen in Severance are all from decades ago, they’re hard to find. Dancy says that some of the cars were found on the Facebook marketplace, while in other cases he left a business card on the windshield wiper of cars on the street to negotiate with the owner. “Staying up all night scouring the the Internet,” said Dancy.
But that’s not all, as the cars had to be repaired and even had their engines replaced so that they wouldn’t make too much noise during filming.
In the interview, Miller detailed how he went about choosing the vehicles for each character. For Mark, the choice was a ’90s Volvo. Since Mark lost his wife in a car accident, it seemed obvious that he would want to drive a safe car. Dylan, a “family man,” drives an original Dodge Caravan, while Milchick has a Royal Enfield because “he has so many quick outings.”
As for Harmony Cobel, she drives a Mk1 Volkswagen Rabbit, which was one of the hardest to find.
“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.”
The full interview gives even more interesting details about the show, and it’s well worth a read. Severance is available on Apple TV+, and there are only two episodes left to the end of the second season.
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