‘Severance’ filmed episode at Nassau Community College

The opening scenes of the most recent episode of “Severance,” which debuted Friday on Apple TV+, were shot on location last summer at Nassau Community College in Garden City, with students paid to serve as extras.

The acclaimed series “had shot some stuff here before,” says Jerry Kornbluth, spokesperson for the 65-year-old school in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, “so they wanted to come up to do some more. The Governor’s Office [of Motion Picture & Television Development] actually contacted us as well to voice their support for them to come on the campus and do it.”

Members of the school’s President’s Cabinet met with producers “who outlined and let us know exactly what they were going to do and where they were going to do it and when they were going to do it,” Kornbluth says. “So we were all in agreement in terms of that” and moved forward “without a lot of red tape.”

A somber science-fiction conspiracy thriller, “Severance” revolves around the cult-like biotechnology firm Lumon Industries, where certain employees have agreed to be surgically “severed”: Their 9-to-5 work selves and their personal selves have no memory or knowledge of each other, other than being aware they each have an “innie” and an “outie” self. In the unsettling white labyrinth that is the “severed floor” of the building, they have no contact with news or anything else about the outside world.

In the final episode season 1, in 2022, three of the four core innie employees — Mark Scout (Adam Scott), Helly Riggs (Britt Lower) and Irving Bailif (John Turturro) — contrived to be very briefly conscious in the outie world. There innie Mark learned that fellow severed employee Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman) was actually his wife Gemma, whom he believed was dead.

The new episode, “Chikhai Bardo” — the title is one of six states of being in Tibetan Buddhism, this one associated with the specific moment of death — includes flashbacks to Mark and Gemma meeting as professors at an unnamed college, falling in love, marrying and being unable to conceive a child.

The episode opens with Gemma walking through an open-air tunnel to the plaza in front of the Nassau Community College administration building, striding past all the usual students milling about. Then an overhead shot diminishes the humans to scurrying ants. (In case we don’t get it, Mark later in the episode brings Gemma an ant farm as a gift.)

The next scene, shot at the college’s A. Holly Patterson Library, chronicles Mark and Gemma’s first meeting, as each donates at a blood drive.

Jessica Lee Gagné — who did double-duty as director and cinematographer in this episode co-written by Mark Friedman and series creator Dan Erickson — “used the plaza level and then shot in the library,” says Kornbluth. The crew grabbed that overhead shot from the roof of the four-story building.

Produced by the companies Fifth Season, Red Hour Films and Westward Productions, normally headquartered at York Studios in the Bronx, the show struck its location camp on the sixth floor of the administration building’s tower.

With no classes in session on the early-summer Friday, Saturday and Sunday during which the shoot took place, the production had Kornbluth’s office post notices to recruit extras for that opening scene. The producers interviewed both “students and faculty,” Kornbluth says, “and there must’ve been at least 30 people from the college” that were paid to anonymously appear.

As standard when productions use a location’s facilities, the college was paid as well, he says — “close to a hundred thousand dollars.”