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This article originally ran on April 1, 2022.
(The Innies are, after all, only acouple of years old.)
The result is an eerie yet playful steel-tonedwork space that befuddles the characters while winking at the audience.
(This piece will be updated as more odd corners of the Lumon office reveal themselves.)
I said, What is this table?
And Dan said, Its the birthplace.
Its the womb of the office.
If you look at those references, it just says work.
Theyre so dominant and powerful.
Its as if the office itself is teaching the Innies what an office is.
We wanted to confuse the viewer about whether this is a period piece, contemporary, or the future.
But then I had the idea that the characters can control them.
They can push them up and down, like a playground.
We brought in every imaginable desktop we could think of, Hindle said.
Its a cathode-ray tube, but its a touchscreen.
It has a trackball.We recognize some aspects of it, and some not at all.
The contradictory qualities are supposed to be baffling but also a bit amusing.
It doesnt look like an adult high-tech computer, Baseman added.
It looks like a toy.
A lot of those were specifically described in the script, like the Chinese finger trap, Baseman said.
Even the erasers were vintage.
Our prop master Cat Millerprocured a lot of those.
We worked with an amazing brain surgeon who took us through how it would actually work, Hindle said.
The paintings needed to look classical but believable, Hindle said.
For some, we worked through 50 options.
Then we printed them out and painted on them.
The architecture of his place is so perfectly wrong, Hindle said.
Since Marks wife has died, nearly everything in his house is stored in the basement.
It was a vintage piece I found at a local shop in New York.
I wanted a sad generic sofa that wasnt brown and wasnt too bright.
Adds Hindle, Its a warm glint in the middle of a blue cold space.
Hes alone and depressed, and theres a little red fish.
Ben would come onto the set and Id say, Have I done it again?
and hed say, Yeah, so we would put things away.
And the scale is always getting bigger as they go further.
We wanted it to be a Victorian house, said Baseman.
