John Turturro and Christopher Walken are television’s most romantic doomed couple on TV so far this year. As Irving (Turturro) and Burt (Walken) on Apple TV+’s Severance, the two actors raised the show’s stakes with their characters’ love, representing the cruel injustice of “innie†life and giving rule-bound Irving a reason to revolt. If you swooned watching the two men of a certain age flirt in a greenhouse, you may wonder how their chemistry got to be so electric. Of course, they’re good actors, but as Walked put it in a New York Times joint interview, “When people are acting together, you can tell when they know each other, and particularly if they like each other and are comfortable together.â€
They like each other so much, in fact, that Turturro says he wanted to publish a book adapting the conversations the two actors had between takes “about cooking, movies and sometimes girls.†It would be called — oh my God — Talkin’ and Walken. Why didn’t they go through with this obvious license to print money? According to the Times, Walken didn’t want to “hurt the feelings†of any living people, meaning these two sweeties were clearly talking shit. Oh to be a workplace surveillance camera on the wall.