Patricia Arquette on Trump, communes, art and ageing: ‘When I was growing up the whole world was pretty creepy’

She won hearts with True Romance – and an Oscar for Boyhood. The actor reflects on her TV show Severance, political chaos in the US and why human beings are a disaster

If escaping the world by running for the hills looks increasingly attractive to many of us – perhaps living on a commune – Patricia Arquette feels like that too. Head to the mountains, she says. “Plant seeds and farm.” But maybe not the commune part – she lived in one as a child and it wasn’t always utopian. If our conversation is more dystopian than usual, it’s probably because we’re talking about Severance, the hit Apple TV+ show now in its second season. In the first series, we were introduced to Lumon Industries, where some workers, tasked with doing something unknown but probably malevolent with data, were willingly “severed”; their work selves detached from their outside selves, with no memory between the two. If the drama started as an off-kilter take on work-life balance, it soon morphed into something much darker.

Arquette plays Harmony Cobel, an icy and (mostly) controlled senior manager at Lumon before she was fired, then rehired. In the outside world, she is Mrs Selvig, neighbour of Mark, another Lumon employee (he is severed, she isn’t, and he doesn’t know she is his boss). Arquette wouldn’t say she likes Cobel as a character. “I feel sorry for her, in a way,” she says. “To be so indoctrinated by a thought system or organisation, whether it’s a religion, or a corporation or a military. Obviously, she’s done some things that are reprehensible, but like all people who do bad things, they always have reasons, excuses, for why they needed to do that thing.”

A forthcoming episode, which Arquette can’t talk about, explains a lot about why Cobel is as she is. It’s intense – the flashes of almost violent emotion we’ve already seen come out in a deluge – and Arquette is typically brilliant. It reinforced her sympathy for the characters. “I kind of feel sorry for everyone. There’s a lot of self-deception, a lot of wanting to belong, of wilful ignorance – and then just a lot of trickery and deception. That is never good.”

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