‘Severance’ Stars John Turturro and Christopher Walken on That ‘Dinner From Hell’ and Why Irving Visits Burt’s House: ‘Curiosity, Insecurity, Jealousy’

variety.com:

Anna Tingley SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 6 of “Severance,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

In the world of “Severance,” the line between one’s two selves — good and evil, innie and outie — can be imperceptibly thin.

For Helly R. (Britt Lower), it was one insensitive joke about Burt (Christopher Walken) and Irving’s (John Turturro) relationship that gave her away as Helena Eagan in Episode 4. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving tells Helena the next morning, before attempting to drown her. “Helly was never cruel.” “Someone can be charming and then they’re a monster,” Turturro tells Variety ahead of the season’s sixth episode, which sees Irving, after being permanently dismissed from Lumon, get a long-awaited glimpse at Burt’s outie life as a married man.

At an awkward dinner with his innie’s crush and his husband Fields (John Noble), Irving begins to piece together who Burt really is. “Irving obviously is the kind of person who knows how to track certain things,” Turturro says, mentioning that a potential military background, briefly alluded to in the first season, is one likely reason for his perceptiveness. “If he’s not sure about something, he’ll track it and he’s mathematical in that approach, saying, ‘Well, this doesn’t equal that, so maybe it could be something innocuous or it could be something threatening.’” Irving smiles politely and slowly sips his wine when Fields mentions his ominous nickname of Attila for Burt (a reference to the militaristic ruler of the Hun empire) and lets it slip that Burt has worked at Lumon since long before the first severed office opened.