Severance creator explains the meaning and method behind the bizarre Irving melon head

One of the most unsettling things to have ever been seen on Severance came last episode – I am, of course, talking about the Irving head made of melon. After the absolute chaos and emotional turbulence of the episode prior, which saw MDR on a team building field trip that ended with huge revelations and the Innie death of Irv, last week’s episode was a quieter, piece moving affair. Mostly. Not including of course the memorial for Irving, which included a particularly unsettling head sculpt of John Turturro made out of melon. The Severance creator has now explained how the melon head of Irving was actually based on a true story, and gave insight into how the insane team actually made it.

Speaking to Polygon, Severance creator Dan Erickson shed some light on the Irving melon head and said how that it was inspired like most of the show by his terrors working in the corporate world. “The genesis of the watermelon goes back to when I was working in a series of corporate jobs — the watermelon spread was a common trope,” Erickson told Polygon. “It would be brought in, and oftentimes it was the worst kinds of melon that nobody likes: the green ones that [taste like] you’re eating air, basically.

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“In the writers room, we had a long conversation about what this event would look like — it’s sort of somewhere half between a funeral and a retirement party,” Erickson said. “We wanted to do it in the language that we’d used before, and I was vaguely aware that melon sculpting was a thing […] but I definitely didn’t think it was as big a thing as it turned out to be. There’s some really elaborate, crazy [examples], like Abe Lincoln as a melon or Bill Clinton as a melon. I was just weirded out by the whole thing, but fascinated.

How they made the head

Penko Platikanov was the guy in charge of making the Severance Irving melon head, and the team originally had worked with fruit but found it really hard to work with – and melons were out of season.

In the end, it didn’t get made out of anything edible at all. And still managed to look yummy. Albeit, terrifying.

Erickson said to conclude: “I mean, I don’t love watermelon. There is something about fruit specifically, and especially being gifted fruit or being given it in a corporate setting, which has always weirded me out because it expires pretty quickly. The second you’re gifted fruit, there’s a clock that starts ticking. So in a way, you’re being given a gift, but also you’re being given something that causes anxiety because it’s just sitting there. It’s going to rot on the table if you don’t eat it.”

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