In the season 2 premiere of Severance, "Hello, Ms. Cobel," the higher-ups at Lumon Industries gather our four "Innies" — Mark, Dylan, Irving and the traitor Helena Eagan — in a windowless room and show them a faux-cheery, super-creepy video about how Lumon is listening to their concerns and changing its policies to better suit their needs. Naturally, they hear the message directly from the Lumon administrative building, which talks to them:
Of course, everything the building says is horseshit. Lumon is a nightmare company that's trying to develop a new form of high-tech slavery with its severance technology, and the Innies are the guinea pigs. But it's hard not to trust what the building tells you when it's voiced by the one and only Keanu Reeves. “He’s just like the most warm and inviting voice,” producer Ben Stiller said during a visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live. “I don’t know if when you see the building and you hear his voice, you necessarily think immediately that it’s Keanu, but then I think you have this just innate feeling.”
Reeves, who has a busy schedule, is a big get for this tiny role, but Stiller initially aimed even higher: he tried to get former president Barack Obama to voice the Lumon building.
“I didn’t ask him in person, I knew someone who knew his lawyer and his lawyer said I can relay the request if you write an email,” Stiller revealed. “So I wrote an email to him saying, like, ‘Hey we have this show,’ whatever. And like two days later, I get an email back from President Barack Obama.”
Obama told Stiller that while he's a “big fan of the show" he didn't have time in his schedule to voice the Lumon Building. “I’m like, what’s more important than doing the voice-over for the animated building in Severance?” Stiller joked.
Back when Obama was still in office several hundred million years ago, he asked for and got advance episodes of Game of Thrones. This was right Jon Snow had died and everyone was wondering what was happening next. They weren't giving those episodes out to anyone, but when the president asks, what are you gonna do? Obama has always been pretty open about the movies, shows and music he's into, so I'm not shocked to hear he's enjoying Severance.
I didn't immediately recognize Keanu Reeves' voice coming out of the Lumon building, but I feel like I would have instantly recognized Obama's, and I would have felt weird. Apparently Stiller and company were really determined to snag a big name to voice that building.
What other surprises do they have in store? New episodes of Severance air Fridays on Apple TV+.
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