Much of Apple TV+’s hit thriller series Severance takes place inside the Lumon Industries complex, where a handful of employees have agreed to work at the biotech company under a strange condition: They have no recollection of their personal lives while at work, nor of their work lives while at home.
The show’s overarching mysteriousness owes a great deal to a unique landmark right here in New Jersey: the Bell Works metroburb in Holmdel.
Bell Works in Holmdel is the setting for the fictitious Lumon Industries in the Apple TV+ series Severance. Photo: Courtesy of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission
Formerly Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, the building has a long real-life history with science and innovative technologies, from Unix operating systems to cosmic microwave background radiation. Today, it’s a place the public can visit seven days a week to enjoy dining options, shopping, pickleball, an indoor walking track and more.
Its mad-scientist vibe, via a sprawling layout and massive glass walls, emphasizes the secretive nature surrounding Lumon’s identity and agenda, explains Jon Crowley, executive director of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission.
Plus, members of the Severance production team (which includes showrunner Dan Erickson and executive producer/director Ben Stiller) “weren’t looking for something that was a square box” when they chose the building to be Lumon’s exterior, says David Schoner, Jr., the film commission’s associate director.
Photo: Courtesy of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission
“They wanted something very distinctive,” Schoner says. “And the great thing about that building is, with it being mid-century architecture, it is unbelievably distinctive.”
Some Severance shots of Bell Works employ conventional TV trickery, such as digital enhancements or fake snow. But the general composition of the building, which Schoner describes as “five football field-size atriums,” was its own special effect.
Photo: Courtesy of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission
Bell Works is not the only Garden State backdrop featured in Severance. In Season 2, which debuted on January 17, a residential neighborhood in Middletown doubled as the home of severed worker Dylan George (played by Jersey native Zach Cherry); another scene was shot at the Alpine Lookout in Bergen County.
New Jersey has increasingly become a hotspot for film and TV productions, following Governor Murphy’s 2018 reinstatement of generous tax incentives for projects shooting here; those projects have included Oppenheimer, Zach Braff’s latest film, A Good Person, and the upcoming Bruce Springsteen movie, Deliver Me From Nowhere.
More projects are soon to come, thanks to construction on a future Netflix mega parcel in Fort Monmouth. Its goal, according to the film commission, is to make it as easy as possible for major studios to work with their commission and state municipalities so that they want to film in New Jersey more frequently.
That means spreading the good word of Jersey versatility. “It’s no good if you’re putting on something and you’re not sending out invites—you’ve got to let people know what’s going on,” says Crowley. “You can’t ever assume that people know who you are. We don’t. We get the word out.”
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