Christopher Walken makes surprise admission about how he watches Severance
Actor, 81, says he doesn’t ‘have technology’
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Your support makes all the difference.Christopher Walken has revealed that he does not stream his own TV show and instead watches Severance on DVD, which the production team on the Apple TV+ show is “good enough to send me”.
The Dune star, 81, said in a new interview that his relationship with technology is minimal at best and that he has never even sent an email.
Starring Adam Scott and Britt Lower as employees of a company called Lumon Industries, the psychological series sees staff undergo a procedure called “severance”, which divides their work and home lives completely in a daring experiment to find a balance.
Walken stars as Burt Goodman, retired head of optics and design at Lumon, who develops a friendship with John Turturro’s Irving Bailiff, which turns romantic.
While Apple TV+ did not release any physical editions for the 2022 series, Blu-Ray sets for season one with 1080p resolution were released on 17 December last year. There have been no further plans or announcements regarding any similar physical copies for Severance.
“I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I have seen Severance on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me,” the actor told The Wall Street Journal when asked if he had studied the first season of Severance before filming for the second began.
“I don’t have a cellphone. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered. I’ve never had a watch either. But if I need the time, I just ask somebody. Likewise, once in a while when I need to use a phone, I just ask if I can borrow one.”
Walken described the onscreen relationship as a “nice change”. “It is romantic. Who knew that was coming? When I was getting started, there was once or twice when I was a kind of leading man. That was gone pretty quickly,” he said. “So to play somebody’s love interest at this point is a nice change,”
Walken has talked about his lack of desire for technology of any kind before as well, confirming earlier this month he hasn’t even watched all of the episodes because he doesn’t have the “equipment”.
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“Not all of them. I can’t. I don’t have the equipment,” he told host Andy Cohen on Sirius XM’s Andy Cohen Live.
Asked if he at least has an Apple TV+ subscription, he said: “I don’t have anything.”
Back in 2020, when promoting Wild Mountain Thyme, Walken had to explain to Stephen Colbert that he needed someone to set up the Zoom interview because “I don’t have a cellphone or a computer”.
He added that mobile phones are like watches because “if you need one, somebody else has got it”. He said he is given a cellphone sometimes on film sets, but it’s more like a “tracking collar”.
“Sometimes on a movie they’ll give me a cell phone, but it’s more so that they can find me,” he said. “Like a tracking collar. If I want to use it, someone has to dial it for me, that kind of thing.”
On the second season, which started releasing weekly episodes on Apple TV+ from 17 January, Walken explained that he didn’t expect his role to continue on, and that it was a “very special job”.
“I thought the first season was it. It was a very special job. It was mysterious, but funny and scary, which I’ve always felt was a good combination,” he said.
The Catch Me If You Can actor added that the cast and crew involved in the show were a big draw for him. “Then there was the fact of Ben Stiller. I was in a play with him 30 years ago, and his mother and father were friends of mine,” he said, referring to the series director.
“There’s John Turturro. I’ve known him for 40 years and we were young actors together. When you know somebody for a long time, it shows. You can tell that these actors like each other.”
In a five-star review of Severance season two, The Independent’s Annabel Nugent called it “strange, stylish and totally engrossing”.
“Severance easily could’ve buckled under the weight of its conceit, but has been held together by the very human connections at its heart,” she wrote. “Thankfully, it is still one of the best shows on TV – certainly, one worth rushing home from the office to watch.”
The first two episodes of Severance season two are available on Apple TV+. The next eight episodes will be released on Fridays until the series finale on 21 March 2025.
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