Apple puts Severance's office in Grand Central — a glass 'Cube' stunt launches Season 2

On January 14, 2025, commuters rushing through New York's Grand Central Station met a strange sight: a glass cube filled with business-casual actors silently miming office work on old data processors. Look closer and one of them was Adam Scott — the star of Apple TV+'s Severance, back for its second season on January 17 after a three-year break.

Apple didn't launch another trailer. It relocated the show's core setting — Lumon's windowless 'severed floor', where severed workers toil under surveillance — into Vanderbilt Hall, one of North America's busiest transit spaces. The bosses (Patricia Arquette, Tramell Tillman) loomed over the 'innies', and at one point Arquette's character punished Scott's by making him stand in the corner facing the gawking crowd: the show's theme of surveillance capitalism made literally transparent.

The stunt merged two proven forces — curiosity-provoking spectacle and star power in the wild. Actors agreed to be watched 'like animals at the zoo' in one of the busiest stations in North America, and Ben Stiller himself stood with the crowd taking photos. For fans it was an Easter-egg hunt inside a mini-Lumon office; for commuters who had never seen the show, it was a five-minute mystery.

It went viral with largely favorable responses — TIME judged it 'a resounding success' on the metric that matters for marketing, public sentiment. A year later the campaign earned both the Webby Award and the People's Voice Award for Social Media Campaign at the 30th Annual Webby Awards, with the Cube also recognized in the Experience Marketing category.