Tom Cruise inspired the opening scene of Severance season 2 – and the running sequence took five months to film

(Image credit: Apple TV Plus)

Severance season 2 hits the ground running – literally. The season premiere opens with Adam Scott's character Mark sprinting through the halls of Lumon Industries after the dramatic season 1 finale, but it turns out the sequence was a long time in the making, and had a famous source of inspiration.

Although the scene looks like one long take, it was actually shot in 10 different parts. "We shot those 10 different pieces over a period of five months," Scott said on the show's official podcast.

"Each one had a different need in terms of what had to be done with the set," Ben Stiller, who directed the episode, continued. "So there was one where we had to do it completely with green screen and have you on a treadmill and have a motion control camera. There was one where we had to pull one of the walls out, and we were using this machine called a Bolt arm, that’s a motion-controlled robot arm with the cameras on."

Stiller added that he should have studied Tom Cruise’s running technique, to which Scott replied, "Which is actually what I did. Anyone that wants to train for running of any kind, just watch Tom Cruise."

Severance, one of the best shows on Apple TV Plus, follows a team of employees in Lumon's Macrodata Refinement division, who've undergone a "severance" procedure to separate their consciousness at work from their consciousness at home. In short, their work selves don't know anything about their personal life, and their selves outside the office don't know anything about what goes on at the office. The cast also includes Britt Lower, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Patricia Arquette, and Tramell Tillman.