The creator of Apple TV+'s hit show 'Severance,' Dan Erickson, revealed an unusual tactic he employed to grab distributors' attention during the show's initial pitch. Erickson used his own blood to create a bloody coffee mug print on the pitch document, ultimately opting for a more realistic approach than using red food coloring.
Published: Jan. 24, 2025, 3:14 p.m. The creator of ' Severance ' used his own blood on a document to get distributors' attention when pitching the show, with its mind-bending premise and quirky, dark tone. But long before its 2022 premiere, the show’s creator, Dan Erickson , devised an unusual plan to get the show noticed. Earlier this month, Erickson recalled getting the idea to put “a bloody coffee mug print” on the show’s pitch document when the team began pitching it to distributors.
After giving red food coloring a go, Erickson decided that it didn’t look real enough and switched to a grislier, more authentic medium. “I bought a little lancing needle that you get to draw blood, and I literally poured my own lifeblood out in order to make this,” he admitted. “So, when you look at the document, you are looking at my literal blood.” Erickson told Stiller, Severance’s primary director and executive producer, and Scott, the show’s star, that he hadn’t confessed to the bloody branding idea sooner because he worried they’d deem him “crazy” and “call the police” instead of making the series. “If you guys want to know why I looked so gaunt during that time, that’s why,” Erickson quipped. Despite the massive success of “Severance,” Erickson was far from an industry veteran when the series was greenlit. In fact, he was working as a Postmates delivery driver at the same time he was going to meetings with distributors. He got the idea for the dystopian show from his time as an employee at a door factory. “It was a very mindless job: cataloging all the different parts of doors. … became so mind-numbing that I had the fantasy that would become the premise of the show: what if I could skip the eight hours of the workday, to disassociate and just get it over with?” Erickson explained during a June 2022 interview with “Severance” follows a group of employees who voluntarily agree to undergo a procedure that separates their work memories from their real-life memories. Their so-called “outies” have no idea what they do at work, while their “innies” have no lives outside the time they spend toiling away at the mysterious corporation Lumon Industries. The show’s highly anticipated second season premiered on Friday, Jan. 17. After learning valuable information about their “outies” during the finale, Lumon’s severed macrodata refinement team — comprised of Mark S. (Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Irving (John Turturro), and Dylan (Zach Cherry) — is on the hunt for more answers in season 2
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