Spoilers for Severance Season 2, Episode 3 are ahead! Read with caution…
→ You can stream Severance with an Apple TV+ subscription, and new episodes drop every Friday.
→ Parks and Recreation is available with a Peacock subscription.
→ Game of Thrones can be watched with a Max subscription.
When Gwendoline Christie was cast in Season 2 of Severance, I immediately got excited for Ben Wyatt. Yes, you read that correctly, I was thrilled for a character who isn’t even on this fantastic Apple TV+ show. However, the reason behind it is Adam Scott plays both Ben on Parks and Rec and Mark on Severance, and Ben is a massive Game of Thrones fan. Excitingly, the actor behind Mark was just as thrilled about Brienne of Tarth joining the cast of the show currently airing on the 2025 TV schedule, and I love how Ben-coded his excitement is.
Being the massive Parks and Rec fan that I am, I was thrilled when Gwendoline Christie joined the Severance cast, because I knew both Ben and Adam Scott are massive GOT fans. Plus, her character in the Apple TV+ show, Lorne, plays a big role in the wild goat subplot that I’ve been dying to see more of. So, when I interviewed Scott about Season 2 for CinemaBlend, I asked him about working with the Brienne of Tarth actress, and he excitedly said:
Everything about Gwendoline is my favorite thing about Gwendoline. She is the best. Brienne of Tarth is one of my favorite characters ever on TV or movies. But then getting to work with her, she's delightful and so good.
I can’t think of a more Ben Wyatt-coded response. If he had met Christie, I think he might have fainted, and he 100% would have been in awe of her skill and talent, just like Scott was. If you don’t believe me, review the Parks and Rec scene of Ben sitting on the Iron Throne, and then tell me it doesn’t emit the same eagerness as Scott’s response above:
As you can see, Ben is like the No. 1 fan of Game of Thrones and its cast, and Adam Scott has the same kind of enthusiasm in real life, which makes this moment in Severance truly iconic from a BTS perspective.
To make matters better, the scene Christie shared with Scott and Helly actress Britt Lower was wild. In Episode 3, we are introduced to her character Lorne, and it becomes clear that she’s in charge of the department that oversees the goats at Lumon.
The scene was ominous, mysterious and dark – despite its stark white setting – and Christie was brilliantly unsettling in it as she basically interrogated Mark and Helly about why they were there. To that point, Scott also talked about working with the GOT star while being around so, so many goats, explaining:
Britt and Gwendoline and I have a scene like a serious acting scene over at Gwendoline’s desk. And the entire time we're shooting that, goats are trying to eat our shoelaces in our pants. The entire time. And there's no stopping them or shooing them. They just come back and they try to eat your clothes.
Between the goats, the questions the goats and this department cause and the incredible back and forth between Mark and Lorne, this Severance scene is one for the history books!
However, it gets even better when you take into consideration just how big of a Game of Thrones fan Adam Scott is and how it harkens directly back to the other character and show he’s best known for, Ben Wyatt and Parks and Rec. Talk about worlds colliding.
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