Ben Stiller has shared that fans won’t need to wait three years for the next season of Severance to release, as they gear up for the finale to drop on Friday.
Severance stars Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry and John Turturro as a group of employees at the murky Lumon company, which the equally suspicious Eagan family runs. All four have undergone a procedure called “severance” in which their consciousness is completely divided between their work selves and home selves in a daring experiment to find a work-life balance.
In an appearance on Jason and Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast, Stiller shared that the next season will likely not face the same delays that the second did.
“No, the plan is not to [wait three years],” Stiller said. “Hopefully we’ll be announcing what the plan is very soon.” Indeed after the season finale, both Ben Still and Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that Severance had been renewed for a third season.
Filming for the second season was delayed, after the first season began streaming in February 2022, by the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America strikes. The second series, which followed the severed employees as they continued to investigate Lumon and what they were really doing at the company, began streaming on 17 January to rave reviews.
In a five-star review of the second season, The Independent’s Annabel Nugent wrote: “Bottling the bolt-from-the-blue brilliance for a second season is infinitely tougher, but Severance pulls it off with style, balancing its various tones as expertly and effortlessly as a waiter during a Friday night rush. Thankfully, it is still one of the best shows on TV – certainly, one worth rushing home from the office to watch.”
Stiller addressed the delays and how the streamer behind Severance has changed since the series first dropped.
“It took us a little bit to regroup, and the show, we shot for 186 days on Season 2. Editing takes a while, but thank goodness the audience was there when we came back. The challenge was to get people who hadn’t seen the show to watch the first season, so Apple did a really good job of getting the word out and we did as much press as we could,” Stiller said.
“Also, three years later, Apple TV+ is actually a different…it’s a different situation there now because they have more viewers. When we started out, we were one of the first shows.”
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The Zoolander star, who directed 11 of the 19 episodes of the series, including the season two finale, also talked about how directing has impacted him as an actor.
“It’s made me admire actors so much more as a director,” Stiller said. “When you’re really just directing, you can just focus on what you’re doing and be there for the other actors and be connected to the crew.”
The finale, titled “Cold Harbor”, has been confirmed as the longest Severance episode ever and will be clocking in at 76 minutes.
In addition, the Australian Classification Board has rated the episode “MA 15+ Restricted” due to its violent content. Previously, “Woe’s Hollow”, which featured one troubling scene, was only rated as “Mature”. A “Parental Guidance” content warning has also been added for sex.
While no announcement for a third season has been made yet, it is expected that the award-winning series will return. Stiller said in a February 2025 interview with The Hollywood Reporter that a writers room in Los Angeles was “underway” for the third season, and implied in an interview with Collider that work had already begun on it back in November 2024.
“You have a responsibility to the audience that you’re going somewhere with it. That’s always been a part of it for us, really understanding where it’s heading to…It should go as long as the story goes, and that’s something we have an idea of, and we’re working towards as we’re starting up our Season 3 work,” Stiller told Collider.
