If it weren’t for the absurdity and mind-numbing grind of the corporate world, we wouldn’t have Severance. Series creator Dan Erickson has often recounted the inspiration for the hit Apple TV Plus show, citing “a really bad office job” as the creative fuel for the show.
We can also thank Erickson’s experiences with corporate hell for the incredible imagery that appeared in this week’s episode of Severance, “Trojan’s Horse”: a watermelon carved to look like John Turturro’s severed head. Episode 5 of Severance season 2 features that unsettling, yet still tasty-looking, fruit sculpture as part of a “funeral” for Irving B., who was terminated from the severed floor in the previous episode.
“The genesis of the watermelon goes back to when I was working in a series of corporate jobs — the watermelon spread was a common trope,” Erickson told me in a Zoom interview. “It would be brought in, and oftentimes it was the worst kinds of melon that nobody likes: the green ones that [taste like] you’re eating air, basically.”
Erickson said he wanted to bring the weirdness of “being gifted food” in an office setting to the episode. Irving’s funeral built on the preestablished tradition of melon parties at Lumon, one of the most coveted employee perks.
“In the writers room, we had a long conversation about what this event would look like — it’s sort of somewhere half between a funeral and a retirement party,” Erickson said. “We wanted to do it in the language that we’d used before, and I was vaguely aware that melon sculpting was a thing […] but I definitely didn’t think it was as big a thing as it turned out to be. There’s some really elaborate, crazy [examples], like Abe Lincoln as a melon or Bill Clinton as a melon. I was just weirded out by the whole thing, but fascinated.”
So, why a watermelon, specifically?
Image: Apple TV
“There’s something so uncannily fleshlike about it,” Erickson explained. “It’s red and it sort of has the consistency of flesh. It’s almost like this bloody face looking at you […] but it’s being presented with this veneer of corporate pleasantness. And then I was like, Well, eventually they’re going to be asked to eat it. They’re going to be called upon to basically eat their friend who’s just died, but in this weird corporatized way.
“I got really uncomfortable as I was writing it, so I figured we were on the right track.”
Bringing the Irving B. fruit head to life was overseen by Catherine Miller, who is responsible for Lumon’s props, from its retro computers to its monochrome finger traps.
“In season 1 there were two melon parties. It was important to [executive producer Ben Stiller] that the second (for Burt’s funeral) raise the bar,” Miller told me via email. “For Irving’s funeral the stakes were higher.
“A carved Irving watermelon head was the answer.”
Severance master sculptor Penko Platikanov is responsible for the actual sculpted watermelon bust in “Trojan’s Horse.” (Platikanov is likewise responsible for creating the waffle party masks, the Kier head in Cobel’s office, the Perpetuity Wing mannequins, and “countless other now iconic elements of the show,” Miller explained.)
“Penko had never tackled fruit carving so we bought a bunch of watermelons (which were out of season and not easy to find in the size we needed!) and started R and D,” Miller recalled. “Penko loved the idea of using the skin of the watermelon as a cap” — for Irving’s hair — “and the squiggly stem of vine as a cap topper.”
Naturally, it was a struggle to capture Turturro’s likeness in fleshy melon form. “For the first couple of days of R and D,” said Miller, “Penko and his carving station was covered in watermelon guts everywhere! it smelled like a proper melon party.”
“We learned quickly that the high water content of the fruit made it incredibly challenging to carve,” Miller said. “They kept turning mushy,” which prevented the crew from getting “the definition and detail we needed. And our schedule was such that we were going to film that scene over the course of many months. Penko started experimenting with alternate materials that would both look like the fruit and give us the details and longevity that we needed.”
Image: Apple TV
Ultimately, the final sculpt was made not with real fruit, but a piece of dense foam coated in paint and lacquer layers to create the color and “wet feel” of a Black Beauty watermelon. For the actual eating of watermelon Irving B., “we created a second melon head out of foam with a ‘slice’ already carved out of it. We matched a real piece of melon into it so it could be pulled out on camera and eaten in the same take,” Miller explained.
The effect was believable enough to fool even Erickson. When we spoke, he actually thought that the Irving B. fruit head was an edible arrangement, not inedible foam. “I literally worry sometimes I’m going to lose my grip with reality, because there’s something so strange about imagining something and then you give it to somebody else and they make it real,” Erickson said. “This was definitely one of those cases.”
The Irving B. fruit head required a lot of research and development, a lot of hard-to-source and out-of-season fruit, and the work of many people, including master sculptors and food stylists. How, I asked Erickson, was Lumon able to turn it around so fast? Fans of the show have asked a similar question about the Claymation-style video shown to MDR in Severance season 2’s second episode, to which Erickson responded: “Anyone who knows an animator can tell you that they are some of the most hardworking and [over]worked people,” and Lumon employees, Erikcson said, “are often called upon to do things that are impossible.”
“We do have a sense of the scale of Lumon’s resources and how they might be able to make that happen,” he explained. “We thought about making that clearer on the show, but […] it feels kind of true to the experience of animators that they would be given this and then, whatever, three days later, this assignment has to be turned around and they just have to make it. It borders on magical realism. But I feel bad for those people in whatever dungeon they’re in.”
Finally, I asked Erickson if, outside of his previous life working corporate office jobs, he’d had any specific fruit-related trauma that led to the creation of Irving B.’s melon head.
“I mean, I don’t love watermelon,” he said. “There is something about fruit specifically, and especially being gifted fruit or being given it in a corporate setting, which has always weirded me out because it expires pretty quickly. The second you’re gifted fruit, there’s a clock that starts ticking. So in a way, you’re being given a gift, but also you’re being given something that causes anxiety because it’s just sitting there. It’s going to rot on the table if you don’t eat it.”
