Ólafur Darri Ólafsson Laughed His Way Through Drummond’s Last Stand
“When I was filming, I was like, This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I had to shut down,” says the Severance actor.
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When Ólafur Darri Ólafsson heard Severance was casting its second season, he told his agent and manager he wanted to be on the show in any capacity. “I was a huge fan,” he says. “The first time I arrived on set and saw those long white hallways, I was giggling.” Ólafsson was unaware at the time that his character, Mr. Drummond — a menacing, stone-faced Lumon executive — was going to meet a comically grisly end in the season finale courtesy of a tag-team ass-whooping from Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Mammalians Nurturable department head Lorne (Gwendoline Christie). When Ólafsson learned of his character’s fate while reading the final script, he couldn’t help but let out a huge laugh. “With the opening punch, it just felt like, What the fuck is happening?” he says. “Then it goes crazy.”
Crazy is somehow an understatement. The sequence opens with confirmation that Lumon has been raising those baby goats for a very specific purpose — animal sacrifice, in fact — as Drummond tries to force Lorne to shoot one in the head with a nail gun. (“You wouldn’t believe how cute that goat was,” Ólafsson admits. “It broke your heart anytime it spoke.”) They’re interrupted, though, by Mark S. loudly searching for the kidnapped Gemma in the hallway. Thwarted, Drummond attacks Mark; the men sucker-punch, bite, and flail until Drummond gets the upper hand and tries to strangle Mark. But Lorne comes to the Innie’s rescue, emerging with the bolt gun and beating Drummond to a pulp. Mark S. forces Drummond, now reduced to a limp body with blood oozing down his face, into the elevator at gunpoint; as Mark starts giving him instructions to help the Gemma rescue … the severed transition process causes a now-Outie Mark to accidentally pull the trigger, shooting Drummond in the throat. The Lumon villain fatally bleeds out as the elevator doors open. “What I love about the scene is that it comes out of nowhere,” Ólafsson explains. “It’s really, really brutal, and you don’t see this kind of violence in Severance much, yet it was funny.”
The scenes took three days to film, with Ólafsson tag-teaming in and out with his stuntman to keep up the intensity. The narrowness of the hallway and the large number of crew members, at times, made him feel claustrophobic. “Guys were coming in and making me look good when I was falling over and then I would come and pretend I was really hurt,” Ólafsson recalls. “I did give Adam a concussion, though, which wasn’t great.” The moment, which made the episode’s final cut, occurs when Drummond whips Mark S. around and pushes him into a wall. Scott’s hands get briefly tangled, and he slams headfirst before he can use another body part to soften the blow. “For a second, no one did anything,” Ólafsson says. “And then everyone was like, ‘Are you okay?’ As soon as everyone knew Adam was okay, Ben was like, ‘Oh, great. We got the shot.’”
Despite the injury, Ólafsson and his scene partners had way more fun filming the sequence than the episode makes it seem. When Lorne cocks the gun to his head, Drummond gives a goofy, “you’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation” face. “He doesn’t look down at Gwendoline’s character as he does to some of the others,” Ólafsson explains. “He’s like, Ah, this is a fight I might actually enjoy. This could be difficult.” The actor even had to prevent himself from breaking during the trio’s scene in the dark hallway. “I loved when Mark and Lorne had their lines about the goat,” he adds. “Lorne tells him, ‘Emile thanks you … Emile is the name of the goat.’ And Adam’s response is, ‘Oh, okay.’ I remember when I was filming, I was like, This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I just had to shut down. I had to be like, Okay, I’m not in this place. Look away.”
While filming the gunshot in the elevator, Ólafsson and Scott passed the time by chatting about their shared love of old films. “There was one take where the blood was like Carrie. It went all into Adam’s eye and he couldn’t see at all,” Ólafsson recalls. He’s not surprised Drummond tried to murder Mark as opposed to, say, knocking him out: “Mark has now done what he needed to do, and that’s it,” Ólafsson explains. “I don’t think Drummond planned to kill him, but when he’s left with the opportunity of doing it and Mark has pissed him off even more, it doesn’t really matter. I might as well kill him. Who cares? No one’s going to say anything.” Ólafsson, for his part, viewed Drummond as an essential cog in Lumon’s machinery of evil. “Drummond is one of those people that have throughout history enabled tyranny,” he explains. “There was or should be a feeling of how much he absolutely despises the severed people. He was born to be an enforcer. It’s a dangerous thing when someone feels that they are so far above you that you’re like an ant to them.”
The last we see of Drummond, he tumbles out of the elevator doors like a rag doll, then gets squished between them. Ólafsson’s stuntman was initially tasked with the fall and lying face down on the floor for several hours, but the actor made the case for himself. “In the end, I was just like, ‘Can I do it?’ They put it down a little mat for me to stay comfortable,” he says. “It was a great final dot.” Somewhere, Mammalians Nurturable is celebrating.
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