“Harmony Cobel, well flip my toboggan!”
Following a four-episode Severance Season 2 stretch without eyes on Patricia Arquette’s character, that expression perfectly captured the feeling fans had when they spotted Cobel’s Volkswagen Rabbit whipping around a twisty mountain road at the top of Season 2, Episode 8, “Sweet Vitriol.”
Since the former Severed Floor manager peeled out of the Lumon parking lot after severing ties with the company in Season 2, Episode 3, her whereabouts were unknown. Turns out, she was speeding back to her hometown, Salt’s Neck, to reluctantly revisit her past and retrieve a crucial item from her childhood home.
Written by Adam Countee and K.C. Perry and directed by Ben Stiller, the standout installment shined a spotlight on Cobel, fleshed out her shrouded backstory, and made a jaw-dropping reveal that set the series on an exciting new trajectory. It also let Arquette, who didn’t get to tag along on the Woe’s Hollow ORTBO, have her own epic location shoot.
“Oh man, it was so cool. It’s so killer up there,” Arquette told Decider over Zoom while reflecting on her time in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. “It’s this incredibly rich world. It’s so, so far away, and it’s one of those frozen-in-time bubbles of a place. You feel the turn of the century, because you can hear the Irish brogue still there from the Irish settlers who came in the late 1700s or early 1800s. It’s so frozen and cut off from everything that things feel 20 years behind — in a good way.”
Destroyed by Lumon, which once operated a now-shuttered ether factory in town, Salt’s Neck is a frigid, grey, coastal, largely abandoned, yet eerily beautiful place. To help set the mood for “Sweet Vitriol,” Stiller captured crashing waves, massive rocks, snow, icebergs, twisty roads, and captivating scenery in the town of Bonavista and Trinity Bay North.
With sets largely limited to Lumon and Mark and Mrs. Selvig’s houses in Severance‘s first two season, Arquette said “it was really fun” to film the Cobel-centric episode in such a “magical place.” She recalled “a fierceness” in the locals and shared a story her driver told of a woman in labor who drove herself to the hospital an hour away by snowmobile. She reminisced about local delicacies like fried cod tongue and culinary catastrophes like cooked seal. (“Don’t ever let someone cook a seal in your house! You can never get the smell out,” she learned.)
“It’s this Ingmar Bergman-esque kind of place. The color scheme. The houses. All of it has this whole specific look. Even shooting in some of those old houses, they don’t have any heating,” Arquette explained. “There’s a part of me that’s a loner and could go live in a place like that at the end of the earth, where you’re literally talking an iceberg floats by.”
Though Arquette’s character traveled solo to Salt’s Neck, “Sweet Vitriol” introduced two key players from Cobel’s past: her estranged Aunt Sissy (Jane Alexander) and her old pal/colleague/flame Hampton (James Le Gros).
“I couldn’t have hoped for two better actors to be working with,” Arquette explained. “I always wanted to work with James Le Gros. And Jane Alexander was a hero of mine who I’d grown up watching. I’d never even hoped to have been able to work with her. We didn’t have a lot of time. We had a much smaller skeleton crew. And we showed up on this tip of the world’s iceberg to had jump in together.”
Celestine “Sissy” Cobel, is a Lumon loyalist and “fucking pariah” in Salt’s Neck who still lives by Lumon’s nine Core Principles despite the company destroying the town. Conversely, Hampton loathes Lumon with a burning passion for many reasons — one being that he and Cobel worked at the ether factory together when they were kids. Like their characters, Arquette and Le Gos go way back, and that familiarity helped cultivate their chemistry in 208.
“I’ve known James since I was a kid. I was 19 or 20 when I met him. I had to move out of my mom’s garage once, and my old boyfriend, [actor] John Philbin, said, ‘My friends are going to come help me,’” Arquette recalled. “It turned out to be James Le Gros, who had done Drugstore Cowboy, and I was already a big fan of his. My god.”
To thank the guys for helping her move, Arquette channeled her inner Mrs. Selvig and baked cookies. Instead of experimenting with chamomile, however, she used walnuts. “James tasted them and was like, ‘These are the best cookies I’ve ever had. Thank you so much.’ And when he left, I tasted the cookie, and it was salty. I was like, ‘No! These are the worst cookies ever on earth!’ They were salted walnuts! That was before people were mixing chocolate and salt. I was a trendsetter,” the Severance star laughed. “But I thought I ruined everything and I was horrible, and he said they were the best. I really do have teenage memories of James, so there was a familiarity. Not just from that, but even the way that we look at the world, the way that we look at movies, and things in the world that influenced us.”
After Hampton and Cobel get high together in 208, Cobel tells him it’s shameful that he sells ether in Salt’s Neck, fueling the devastating ether addiction that ultimately killed her mother, Charlotte. In the episode’s most heart-wrenching scene, Cobel lies on her late mother’s bed, breathes into her old medical tube, and wails as she mourns her loss.
“I’ve had a lot of losses in my life, and certainly a lot of people I’ve taken care of. And some people I’ve taken care of were really not that grateful and never really got to see the gifts you were giving them,” Arquette said when asked how she tapped into the raw emotion required for the scene. “Cobel’s back in this place where her Aunt Sissy doesn’t see her at all. And there’s the ghost of the mother, who she lost so early on — long before her mother died, because when you have a drug addict parent, they never can give to you. And then this corporation that separated children from their parents so much also robbed her of essential bonding in childhood with her parent.”
“There was just so much missing, and longing, and loss,” Arquette continued. “I, myself, have taken care of a lot of people through their dying time. And there are these artifacts, like machines and breathing tubes. When I was taking care of my mother, the certain accouterments of caretaking that they had at that time… Sometimes I’ll see people and they’ll have a certain kind of wound care that didn’t exist 30 years ago. And I’m like, ‘Oh that’s interesting. That would have been useful to have.’”
The fact that Cobel’s aunt never let her say goodbye to her mother further fueled the scene’s emotion in Arquette’s mind. Though Charlotte is gone, Arquette says a crucial part of her spirit lives on in Cobel. “Her mom was such a rebel, and she has that rebel within her, also. Even though she tries to kill it all the time, Cobel has an inner rebel about Lumon, about her aunt, and about the way of looking at the world,” the Severance star explained.
Before the end credits roll, Cobel finds an old notebook she was searching for, channels that inner rebel, and finally tells Sissy the jaw-dropping news that she played a crucial role in inventing the severance procedure and Jame Eagan took credit for her ideas and convinced her to stay silent.
“We’ve been battering around that idea for a while. In Season 1 we were talking about the possibility,” Arquette explained. “There were a lot of things I knew already from the beginning: She lived in this place, she went to a school that was part of Lumon, her mother became an ether addict, and there was this ether factory. And I finally got to see them come together, which is so cool.”
The conversation now, Arquette said, is how much Cobel had to do with the original chip. “It’s more like they were all working on this thing, but they were stumped. And she’s the one who brought it together,” the actor explained. “She’s in the structure of this organization that will never give you personal credit. We see this in echoes of different structures, different religions, different things throughout history. Everything’s for the greater good. It’s unseemly to take credit.”
That’s what Cobel, the Severed Floor manager, convinced herself to believe. Now that Lumon kicked her to the curb, however, Cobel the rebel returns in full force. And in addition to the 208 cliffhanger, which teases Cobel teaming up with Devon (Jen Tullock) and Mark (Adam Scott) to take on Lumon, Arquette promises another “very satisfying” reveal before Season 2 ends.
New episodes of Severance Season 2 premiere Fridays on Apple TV+.
The post ‘Severance’s Patricia Arquette On Cobel’s Homecoming And Mourning Her Mother: “There Was So Much Missing, And Longing, And Loss” appeared first on Decider.
