If you’ve seen the latest episode of Severance, you know it ends with another huge revelation—one that we won’t spoil here at the top in case you haven’t seen it yet. But it involves Harmony Cobel, played by Patricia Arquette, who is front and center of the eighth episode called “Sweet Vitriol.” In a new interview, the True Romance star discussed not just what the bombshell reveal means for the future of the show, but how all the new information in the episode impacts her character.
The episode follows Cobel to her hometown of Salt’s Neck, which has been decimated by Lumon. There, in her childhood home, she finds an old notebook that proves she invented severance, not Jame Eagan. A secret she’s been hiding for years and has been told to repress. It means Cobel is much more invested in all of this than we even realized, and that the betrayal she feels from Lumon runs deeper too. Speaking to Collider, Arquette gave a bit more context and teased what it means for Cobel moving ahead.
“She was working on that with a bunch of people who were trying to work on that, because it had been one of Kier’s concepts, but they weren’t able to make that breakthrough, whereas she was able to come up with this,” Arquette said. “She also never got that kind of acknowledgment. Her mom wasn’t really around, her aunt wasn’t going to give it to her. Nobody’s really going to ever give her the approval that she’s been seeking her whole life, and she continues to seek. Nobody’s giving her the love that she longs for in some kind of way, the approval that she wishes she could have, but it’s really all she knows, this giant, broken, and complicated organization. But she is proud of herself inside, and I think she also does have a lot of what she considers righteous anger about what she is contributing and how that is just constantly being belittled and how she’s not being treated with any kind of respect.”
Because the audience first meets Cobel as a leader at Lumon, we see her as an authority figure. But here, Arquette flips that a bit and shows the character’s vulnerability—the way she’d been manipulated throughout her life and how she is now, finally, taking control.
Her life became much clearer over the course of the episode with the reveal of the Lumon ether factory, Cobel’s accomplishments as a child, and more. All of which, she revealed, she was aware of during season one. “Early on, I was given that I’d grown up in this town that was very impacted by Kier and Lumon, and that I’d gone to the school, and that my mother was an ether addict,” Arquette said. “Then, I started at school and there was this ether factory in town that kind of loomed large, and it environmentally destroyed this town. I’d already had all of that from the first season, but it was nice to be able to see the school, see the world, see the beginning.”
“Nice” for her, maybe, but terrifying and heartbreaking for us.
Hopefully we’ll see what Cobel does with the proof of link to severance, and how this past will impact the future, over the next two episodes as season two wraps up. You can stream Severance on Apple TV+ and read more from Arquette over at Collider.
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