Spoilers ahead.
For three long years, Severance fans were left clinging to two words at the end of the season 1 finale: “She’s alive!” In that thrilling scene, protagonist Mark S. (Adam Scott)—who underwent the severance procedure that separates his working self (“Innie”) from his personal self (“Outie”) after his wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) died—desperately tries to tell his sister that Gemma isn’t dead after all. As we, and Mark’s Innnie, found out in season 1, Gemma is still very much alive and wandering the stark white halls of Lumon Industries as the wellness director Ms. Casey.
In season 2, we finally get some answers about Gemma’s journey. The seventh episode, titled “Chikhai Bardo,” chronicles her relationship with Mark, showing their meet-cute while donating blood, their happy life as college professors, and a devastating miscarriage that changes their marriage. The episode directed by Jessica Lee Gagné (who primarily works on the show as a cinematographer) jumps through time, flashing between these intimate moments between the couple and rare glimpses into where Gemma is now. She’s kept like a prisoner on Lumon’s testing floor and is forced to repeatedly enter rooms where she faces bizarre situations like writing thank-you cards on Christmas or riding an airplane amid turbulence. (Viewers might recognize the names of those rooms as the projects that Mark is working on with the Macrodata Refinement team.)
While Severance is known for its fan theories and mind-boggling sci-fi elements, Mark and Gemma’s love for each other is deep in the show’s core. It was crucial to Lachman that audiences “understand why Mark did what he did [to become severed], to feel the loss of that relationship,” she told ELLE.com over a Zoom call. While she didn’t feel comfortable speculating on the meaning of the seventh episode title—the chikhai bardo is a Buddhist belief about a transitional state between death and rebirth, which could point to reintegration for both Mark and Gemma—she did agree that the severance procedure is all about transforming, something both characters are grappling with throughout the series.
So why—and how—is Gemma at Lumon and what is going on with the rooms on the testing floor? Will she ever be able to escape, especially after we witness a failed attempt in “Chikhai Bardo”? Lachman spoke to us about what she thinks is going on at the company, her layered performance, and how she and Adam Scott established their chemistry in this standout episode.
This is the first time we really see Mark and Gemma together. How did you and Adam Scott create and establish your chemistry?
Adam is just such a generous actor. Up to this point, I was sort of left out, so for me it was like, I gotta get in, I gotta deliver, and I’ve got to be absolutely on point. Adam went out of his way to make me feel comfortable, and I think that that chemistry is there because of his generosity. Also the writing helps and Jessica really did a wonderful job framing it. Severance is in a very controlled, oppressive, and symmetrical setting, but this episode had so much more movement and was so much freer. With the combination of the medium and style changing a little bit, Adam’s generosity, and obviously all the other departments who were so integral in telling the story, that all helped make everything just click and feel really lived-in.
This episode reveals how Mark and Gemma coped with the grief of a miscarriage. How did it feel to portray that as part of Gemma’s story?
I thought it was a really important story to tell, because it’s such a common thing that women go through. A lot of women feel very isolated when that happens to them, so it was nice to be able to represent that story even when it’s not the most important part of the show. I appreciated that, and because two men [Dan Erickson and Mark Friedman] were writing the scripts, they were open to input from Jessica and myself in terms of delicately playing with the balance of that.
Blood was a recurring motif in the episode: Mark and Gemma meet while donating blood, Gemma suffers a miscarriage, and a Lumon employee pricks her finger to gain access to the various rooms. Blood can represent a lot of things, from life and death to family. What do you think it symbolizes in Gemma’s story?
That’s something that I hadn’t thought about, but perhaps it’s a reminder that we’re all human. If you prick us, do we not bleed?
Your performance had to be nuanced when balancing the different versions of Gemma. How did you keep all of it straight?
That was really tricky. I used my body to transition into the given circumstances. We don’t get to spend a lot of time with these Innies; it’s just part of the the torture Gemma’s subjected to everyday. There are a lot of rooms down there, and we’re only seeing the Christmas room and the airplane, but what else could possibly be down there that’s even darker than that? The Innies don’t really understand the outside world, so I leaned into the circumstance that each Innie had a different physicality. I would be in a position of fear or boredom or a rebellious teenager. It was subtly working on the physicality, and internally figuring out what that Innie was going through.
Do you remember any specific direction you got from director Jessica Lee Gagné?
Specifically with the Christmas scene, it was that adolescence and that defiance, and we went from internalizing that to getting quite angry with [Doctor, played by Robby Benson]. [Gagné] really wanted to test scenes in lots of different ways, so we had the time to go through such a spectrum of intensities.
One of the big themes of the season is the consciousness of the Innie vs. the Outie. Do you think your Innies are fully aware of what’s happening to them within Lumon’s walls?
I wonder about that too—maybe it depends on how much time is spent as that Innie. But also everyone reacts to things differently. Like, ibuprofen will really affect me but my friend will pop them whenever they have a bad back. It’s got to be the same thing. I feel like if you’re going to get a chip in the back of your head, the length of time of it being there and the amount of time spent as that person has to affect [the experience].
Why do you think Gemma signed up for this program at Lumon?
That is still a mystery to me. But you’ll notice that they’re living in a Lumon world—everything they come in contact with is Lumon branded. The card that she's looking at in the mail in this episode is from Lumon, the Christmas tree in their house is reminiscent of the Christmas tree in the Christmas room. So there’s some bigger involvement in terms of this town and this world. The possibilities are endless.
What are they trying to get from Gemma by putting her into these rooms and having her experience these different scenarios?
In our society, we have this desire to avoid anything unpleasant. I think Lumon is trying to develop a chip so that no one ever has to experience anything unpleasant, like going to a job they don’t like or giving birth or going to the dentist, like we see Gemma do in this episode. Our society is going in a direction where we don’t want to experience or feel anything unpleasant, and this is a way of shutting all of that out. But I would probably never get this severance chip because you can’t experience joy, fun, pleasure, or leisure without the contrast of the things that you don’t like.
Do you think she regrets signing up for whatever is happening inside the Lumon walls?
She definitely doesn’t want to be there. You’ll notice in the flashbacks that the doctor is present in the fertility clinic, he walks by in the background. So I definitely think she doesn’t want to be down there, and I don’t think Gemma would volunteer to be severed.
The doctor tells her that Mark remarried and has a daughter now; Gemma responds by hitting the doctor on the head with a chair. Why do you think she doesn’t believe their manipulation?
It’s funny that you bring that up, because we did that scene a few different ways. I’m glad they chose the one where she’s not affected, because it shows her resilience. Down there, time moves at a different pace, and in the episode before, [Severance] alludes to the fact that she broke [the doctor’s] fingers at one point—I think that that’s why Jessica wanted a little bit of that rebelliousness to come out in that Christmas scene. Because even if you compartmentalize the pain, there’s going to be qualities that end up in these Innies.
Gemma’s severed personality, Ms. Casey, appears when she tries to escape and winds up on the severed floor. Ms. Casey seems to sense that something was amiss and it felt like a glimpse of Gemma’s consciousness was pushing through there. Did you read that scene like that as well?
Yes. Ms. Casey is wearing a completely strange outfit, she doesn’t have her hair, and she’s kind of confused. The last time she was in that hallway, it was to say goodbye, and she wasn’t given any answers. So she’s a little bit like, Oh, I’m coming back, but it feels different because she’s just been through something. That was a tricky one to film because I also wondered, would she physically have a little bit of that adrenaline from escaping running through her and maybe that's why she feels a little weird?
How many times do you think this cycle has happened, where Gemma tries to escape but gets stuck in the loop of exiting on the severed floor?
I want to believe that it happened many times, and that she just doesn’t give up—every now and then she’s like, I’m just gonna go for it again. Maybe this time it’ll work. To me, she’s been trying to get out of there since the moment she got in.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
