From Bell Labs to Lumon Industries: The Building That Brings ‘Severance’ to Life

To bring to life the nefarious corporation at the center of the dystopian thriller “Severance,” the director of photography Jessica Lee Gagné needed to find the right location for a fictional headquarters.

As she scoured the internet for abandoned malls, she stumbled upon a blog with photos of a decaying, hollowed-out midcentury office building called Bell Labs. There was an eerie emptiness, even as its wraparound internal walkways, triangular skylights, magnificent sunken lobby and giant planters built into a vast atrium remained.

Ms. Gagné typed “Bell Labs” into Google Maps and zoomed into Holmdel, a rural town in central New Jersey. “When I saw the overhead of it, I was like, this can’t be true,” she said. “Is this a real place?”

Within days, she and Ben Stiller, the director and an executive producer of the serial for Apple TV+, went to New Jersey — they drove up the winding access road, passing a looming, three-legged white water tower shaped like a radio transistor. The building had been renovated since the photos were taken, but the developers had not dulled the impact of its corporate frigidity.

“There was a part of me that couldn’t believe how perfect it was,” Ms. Gagné said of seeing the mirrored building that she saw in the summer of 2019. “It was this mind-blowing moment.”