Ben Stiller has revealed what happened when he offered former President Barack Obama a role on his Apple TV+ series Severance—and why the president politely declined.
On Monday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, Stiller was asked about one of the show’s most inquired about uncredited roles, the narrator of the “Lumon is Listening” sequence—and the recognizable voice behind it. “People say it sounds like Keanu Reeves,” Kimmel said. “You’ve been asked about this. You’ve not answered the question. Is that Keanu Reeves’ uncredited voice?” Stiller confirmed for the first time that it is—but Reeves wasn’t the first famous person he’d asked to do it.
“There was one person that I asked before him and he said no,” Stiller said. That person was President Barack Obama.
“I didn’t ask him in person,” he continued. “I knew someone that knew his lawyer, and his lawyer said ‘I can relay the request if you write an email.’ So I wrote an email to him.” Stiller didn’t get the response he was hoping for, but he did find out that Obama was a “big fan” of the show.
“Like two days later, I get an email back from President Barack Obama saying, ‘Hey Ben, big fan of the show, love Season 1, can’t wait for Season 2. I don’t think I have time in my schedule to make this happen.’”
Stiller joked, “Like, come on, what’s more important than doing the voiceover for the animated building in Severance? But it was pretty cool that he responded.”
The show’s second season started filming October 2022, right when the former president would’ve hit the campaign trail ahead of the midterm elections that year. Filming continued into 2023, during which he would have been working on his own Netflix and Spotify projects with he and his wife Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company. But Stiller said he was very pleased with Reeves’ “serious” commitment to the Lumon role.
He and Reeves “did it like a full-on recording session,” Stiller said, even though they were on opposite coasts. “He went into the studio and did multiple takes and he took it very seriously,” Stiller said of Reeves. “I mean he’s just like the most warm and inviting voice, and I don’t know if when you see the building and you hear his voice, you necessarily think immediately that it’s Keanu.”
