Yes, It’s Keanu

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Spoilers follow for Severance season-two premiere, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” which premiered on Apple TV+ on January 17. 

You heard that right. “Lumon Is Listening,” and the voice uttering the company’s response to the Branch 501 Innie revolt is an actor whose four decades of work have cycled through Kier Eagan’s four Tempers. As Shadow the Hedgehog, malice; as Neo and John Wick, dread; as Johnny Utah, woe; as Ted Logan, frolic — and now, as an anthropomorphic representation of Lumon, Keanu Reeves veers into the buoyantly propagandistic. Mythmaking is one of Lumon’s favorite modes, and Reeves’s “natural” vocal affect made him the perfectly counterintuitive choice to articulate their agitprop, says Severance creator Dan Erickson. “You would almost think of the Lumon building as having this big, grand, lofty way of speaking,” he says. “Somehow, Keanu’s voice is the perfect juxtaposition.”

Reeves provides the narration for “Lumon Is Listening,” a bombastic stop-motion-animation sequence that plays out like a mini-movie in the Severance season-two premiere. Mr. Milchick presents the video as Lumon’s official response to the macrodata refinement team’s enactment of the overtime contingency in the season-one finale; that cliffhanger saw Mark S., Helly R., and Irving B. transfer their Innie consciousnesses into their Outie bodies, with Dylan G. staying behind to handle the mechanics needed for their mental jailbreak. Back on the severed floor for season two, the Innies have no idea what happened after their brief visit to the external world, or even how much time has passed. To help placate the quartet while secretly spinning the company’s own version of events, Milchick wheels out a projector to screen “Lumon Is Listening.”

The video combines stop-motion puppetry re-creating the MDR team’s movements with recordings of their actual conversations, signaling to the refiners that they were being monitored the entire time. Their building itself comes alive via Reeves’s voice to offer rapturous commendations assuring the Innies that their “Macrodat Uprising” has inspired Lumon to initiate “bounteous reforms” in order to boost workplace happiness. “Under my literal nose unfolded a human drama of danger and intrigue … I thank Kier for them. I thank Kier for the Macrodat Uprising,” Reeves says in an ebullient cadence, his tone capturing the just-this-side-of-insincere note so many Lumon employees seem programmed to deliver.

Over Severance’s ten episodes so far, Lumon has been presented as a nebulous but inarguably powerful corporation that controls nearly all aspects of its employees’ lives, particularly those of the Innies, who only come alive on the Severed Floor. “Lumon Is Listening” was another way to drive home the company’s ability to dictate what these employees believe and how they act as a result. “We talked a lot about how whistleblowers are treated by companies, and how oftentimes the rebellion is co-opted by the powerful entity and used to strengthen it,” says Erickson. “Lumon can control the narrative in a way no other company can because they are so in control of the flow of information.” The film’s combination of cartoonish puppets and threatening narration is well in line with Severance’s established grasp on the absurd and ominous. As Ben Stiller puts it, “It’s this friendly, fun, happy thing, but underneath it, it’s basically Lumon saying, ‘We know what you did. Don’t do this again.’”

In Erickson’s original script, “Lumon Is Listening” was a live-action short film inspired by a PSA-style video from his childhood instructing students not to litter in their elementary school. “It was about two kids who are at school after-hours, and the school starts talking to them via the PA system: ‘Don’t put tape on the chalkboards, kids, because I don’t like that,’” Erickson remembers. “It was this weird, cheesy thing.” When he brought the idea to Stiller, the latter suggested stop-motion animation because live-action “brought up too many questions about ‘who are these actors’” Stiller says, referencing the secrecy surrounding all operations on the Severed Floor. Instead, Stiller pointed to the iconic Rankin/Bass holiday specials produced in the 1960s and ’70s, the aesthetic of which seemed to fit in the retro Severance world, especially Lumon’s tendency toward performative flair. (Remember that choreographed dance in the Perpetuity Wing?)

Once Stiller and Erickson decided on stop motion, they reworked the script so all the roles in the video would be occupied by either the MDR team or anthropomorphic structures. (In addition to Reeves, Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Sherman voices the water tower.) Stiller then reached out to Duke Johnson, a stop-motion specialist who co-directed 2015’s Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman; Johnson connected the Severance team with Starburns Industries, the animation studio where he serves as creative director. Their team, in particular producer Alyssa Choate Rusche, “held our hands” through the process, Stiller says: Starburns produced a pencil-drawn storyboard to nail down the sequence’s timing and, after that was locked and all the shots were finalized, began building “bespoke” puppets with fully functioning armature based on Scott, Lower, Cherry, and Turturro (“I love that they made Irv’s hair out of a sponge,” Stiller adds), and various sets that mimicked stills provided by Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle. A new score from Severance composer Teddy Shapiro and a temporary scratch track of the voice-over helped guide the frame-by-frame filming process, which was overseen by director Michael Granberry at Starburns’s Los Angeles headquarters in September 2022.

“Lumon Is Listening” is packed with details about the secretive company, including the fact that Lumon operates in 206 countries; visual nods to the series’ lore, such as a goat drinking from the pond in front of the Lumon building; and, as an homage to the Rankin/Bass special The Year Without a Santa Claus, Irv’s hair bursting into flames when he says “Let’s burn this place to the ground.” (That was a tribute to Heat Miser, says Stiller, who kept a number of the stop-motion pieces from Starburns for the Severance production offices.) When the director filmed the scene of the Innies watching the video, it wasn’t yet finalized, and Reeves hadn’t yet signed on, so the MDR crew instead watched an animatic (i.e., an in-the-works version of the animation) with Stiller himself doing the narration. After Reeves agreed to voice Branch 501, he and Stiller did a recording session via Zoom. “He did a lot of takes, wanted to get it right, and was totally committed in the time that we did it together,” Stiller says. “I thought, Is this going to be almost distracting, because it’s Keanu? But then when I saw his voice with the building, it had its own personality.” Erickson, who says the idea to have Reeves voice Branch 501 came to him in his sleep, is similarly effusive about the performance: “I just like, experienced pure bliss for perhaps the first time in my life.”

“Lumon Is Listening” was finalized in late December 2022, but Severance’s second season had only been filming for three months, so Stiller describes the process of finishing it and moving on to the rest of the season as “putting it into a time capsule.” Now, more than two years later, it’s available for Severance fans to dissect — but Stiller demurs from addressing whether Reeves’s narration means that Keanu himself exists in Severance’s world and is on Lumon’s payroll. “I think that’s a greater, bigger question about where Kier is and what the world is. We intentionally don’t ever want to indicate any specific cultural reference points,” Stiller says. “That’s for people to figure out.”