Bonavista and Trinity Bay North on the Bonavista Peninsula in Newfoundland played the bleak, wintery town of Salt’s Lick for the hit Apple TV+ series Severance, about a team of Lumon Industries office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives.
The episode, titled Sweet Vitriol, tells the origin story of Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel, a mysterious Lumon executive who used to manage the Severed floor.
Production filmed in the area for five weeks in 2023, turning an old fish plant into an abandoned Lumon ether factory, where Harmony Cobel worked as a child.
Early Lumon is clearly part of a broken-down industrial age. The ether factory was an attempt at something big, but you can see it didn’t work and it created this whole environmental nightmare, too. They killed this whole town, and now there’s the new, rebranded Lumon with its bright carpeting, new aesthetic, and cute cartoons. — Patricia Arquette to Vulture.
We’re literally rattling around in a house from the turn of the past century; it felt like we were in a time warp. — Patricia Arquette to Vulture.
Newfoundland is a time bubble. IIt’s this incredibly rich world — Patricia Arquette to Decider.
Executive producer Ben Stiller directed the episode, using his core crew from New York supplemented by a local crew (including some members from Montreal).
There’s also a kind of lingering Bergmanesque coldness and loneliness to the whole area . . .that’s reflected in real things like the icebergs floating by. — Patricia Arquette to Vulture.
Iceberg floats by Bonavista.
Bonavista is known for its colourful houses, but Salt’s Lick is drained of colour.
Severance Season 2:
Filmed in New York.
Showrunner: Dan Erickson.
Cast: Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, John Turrturo, Patricia Arquette, Tramell Tilman, Christopher Walken, Ditchen Lachman, Jen Tulloch, Michael Chervis.
Producer: Ben Stiller.
