- “Severance,” an office thriller show, is partially filmed at a real office in suburban New Jersey.
- The office, Bell Works, was originally Bell Labs, a historic incubator for telephone technology.
- Today, the building is a mixed-use development with office space, stores, and restaurants.
Lumon Industries — the fictional employer at the center of the workplace thriller “Severance” — is probably not anyone’s ideal employer.
In the Apple TV+ series, Lumon is a cult-like biotechnology company that employs, in part, “severed” workers. These employees undergo a procedure that separates their consciousness into two parts: an “outie” who goes about life on the outside, and an “innie” who toils away in the basement on mysterious tasks. As a result, their restrictive workspace is the only world that they’ve ever known.
Workers at the 60-year-old office complex where parts of the show are filmed, however, have the option to order caviar service and mezcal negronis at its on-site restaurant and bar.
Bell Works in Holmdel, New Jersey, a township about 30 miles south of Newark, was once a hub of technological innovation. Formerly Bell Laboratories, the 2-million-square-foot building was designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen for a division of AT&T and opened in 1962.
At first, it was where scientists researched and developed technologies for phones and other devices. In 2015, though, it was transformed into a walkable complex of modernized office space plus restaurants, bars, shops, and more.
While Bell Works may still look huge and monolithic from the outside, its interior is more bustling and alive than the sterile and mundane aesthetic of the show suggests.
Here are four facts about the office building used as a filming location for “Severance.”
1. Only parts of Lumon’s office are filmed at Bell Works
“Severance” features Bell Works’ exterior and entrance, as well as its actual parking lot.
Its central, iconic skylit atrium also appears in a few scenes.
The rest of the show was filmed in New York on several sound stages, according to Curbed.
Production designer Jeremy Hindle built the interior of the office from the ground up — from the narrow hallways throughout to the iconic green carpet.
“Green is the most common color to your eye, like that’s the theory that it’s calming, it makes you feel calm,” Hindle told Variety in 2022. “Some of the colors, the theories were kind of who they are as characters and what they needed to survive. I think green is something you need to survive.”
2. The original Bell Labs building was a tech incubator
While nobody in the show knows what Lumon Industries’ severed employees really do, we have records of what developments have emerged from work in the Bell Labs building.
From 1962 to 2007, the Bell Labs building had over 6,000 employees — including a few Nobel Prize winners — who were responsible for many technological innovations.
The theory for the laser, as well as the Big Bang Theory, originated in the Bell Labs building. It’s also the location of the receiving end of the first cellphone call.
Bell Labs is now a mixed-use development called Bell Works
Inside, the current Bell Works building is nothing like the office in “Severance.” It’s also much changed from its original look, thanks to some recent renovations.
A New Jersey-based firm, Somerset Development, purchased the building in 2013 for $27 million with plans to modernize the outdated and unused office building.
“The greatest experiment is yet to come for these walls, and that is the ability of a community to come together,” Somerset Development president Ralph Zucker told NJ.com in 2013. “This building will be repurposed as a place for living.”
Somerset renamed it Bell Works, which is now a mixed-use building with office space, retail, and dining. It also hosts conferences and events.
More than 70 vendors have set up shop in Bell Works, including local eateries, a bar, an indoor golf simulator, and a basketball court for tenants that is sometimes open to the public. There’s also fitness franchise F45 and ice cream shop Jersey Freeze.
Tenant companies include local utility Jersey Central Power & Light, HR recruiting software iCIMS, and major insurer Guardian Life.
Bell Works’ website calls it a “Metroburb,” which it defines as “a little metropolis in suburbia.”
The show spent almost 5 times as much money filming the second season in New Jersey
The budget for the second season of “Severance” is nothing to sniff at.
According to NJ.com, during its first season, the show spent $5.1 million filming in New Jersey. The second season eclipsed that number by a lot after spending more than $24 million over three years filming in New Jersey.
Kings Landing, a condominium complex in Middletown, New Jersey, was another filming location, and part of Palisades Interstate Park in Alpine, New Jersey, which overlooks the Hudson River, was also used.
Further north, Phoenicia Diner in the Catskills was used to film scenes at Pip’s Bar & Grille.
Palmer Haasch contributed reporting to this story.
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