Imagine a world where your reality splits in two, where the lines between who you truly are and who you are pretending to be, begin to blur. For Ben Stiller, this wasn’t just the plotline of Severance, but a real-life experience.
Stiller lived through a surreal moment during a wild drug trip that made him question his own existence. So let’s look at this bizarre chapter in the actor’s life that might have helped him understand psychological duality, and add a deeply personal layer to his work on Severance.
Ben Stiller’s psychedelic misadventure
Ben Stiller’s first encounter with LSD wasn’t exactly the mind-expanding revelation that one hopes for. He recounted the events in Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics, a Netflix documentary, and shared how he was unprepared for the intense fear and anxiety that consumed him during the experience.
I was so not ready to take acid. It was a huge mistake. In retrospect, I didn’t realise how much it was gonna change my life, because it really changed my life for a long time.
‘I just thought, you know, “Here we go, it’s gonna be great. I was hoping for some sort of psychedelic revelation, kind of Hair-like with just amazing imagery and some sort of opening into some sort of other form of consciousness.
The reality was far from what he imagined and in the moment of desperation, he called his father, Jerry Stiller who initially struggled to grasp the situation.“I think he might have thought that I drank some battery acid or something,” Stiller quipped. But his father managed to calm the actor down, with a mix of humor and reassurance.
How Ben Stiller’s real-life chaos might have influenced Severance
Ben Stiller’s harrowing LSD trip might have happened decades ago, but the impact is still present in his work. He’s involved in projects that explore themes like identity and duality, which are concepts that Stiller understands all too well and has always been drawn to.
In Severance, characters undergo a procedure that splits their memories into halves, between their work and personal selves. This unsettling premise mirrors Stiller’s experience of not being able to understand during the drug-induced episode.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty actor said, “I had no idea where I was, who I was, or what the whole context of life was.” The sentiments he felt during the trip are eerily similar to the disorientation that people experience in the show. So, Stiller’s drug experience might have been an intense and harrowing experience at the moment, but it did become a source of creative inspiration.
You can watch Severance on Apple TV+.
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