Ontarian with Stage 4 cancer meets ‘Severance’ cast in ‘surreal’ turn of events

Patricia Arquette (far left), Emily Powell-Heaton (left) and her husband, and Ben Stiller (right).

It was all thanks to a single post on X that Emily Powell-Heaton and her husband were able to watch the finale to “Severance” with the show’s cast and mark off a bucket list item.

Powell-Heaton, 34, has metastatic—Stage 4—breast cancer, a diagnosis she said she received four years ago. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, about 15 per cent of patients have de novo metastatic breast cancer, when the cancer is found to have spread at the time of the initial diagnosis—which happened to Powell-Heaton.

“It was very much a surprise,” Powell-Heaton told CTV News Toronto on Monday.

One of the bucket list items for Powell-Heaton, she says, was to meet any of the cast and crew from the critically acclaimed Apple TV+ show. What draws Powell-Heaton to “Severance” is the show’s originality.

“It was such a nice, refreshing change to see something fun and new on TV,” Powell-Heaton explained, likening her watching experience to the same feeling she got when she first watched J.J. Abrams’ “Lost.”

“I just love everything about it. I have a background in film, and I really enjoy the plot, the characters, everything, the art direction—I love everything.”

Years ago, Powell-Heaton said she tagged the Academy Awards in a Twitter post where she dressed up as the golden Oscar statue. In turn, the academy invited her to watch the event.

“I thought, ‘Well, you know what, let met try.’ So, I put it out there,” Powell-Heaton said.

In the viral post, Powell-Heaton tagged Ben Stiller, the series' director, and asked him if it would be at all possible to meet him and any of the cast and crew of the show as it would be a “great bucket list item to check off.”

She just got home from dinner with a friend when the post exploded, and she saw that Stiller had responded in kind, asking the Markham woman to message him directly.

“It was surprising, and then it was just incredible,” Powell-Heaton said.

Powell-Heaton said she was encouraged to contact Apple’s team to attend a TIFF screening on March 6, where actors Zach Cherry and Tramell Tillman—who play Dylan G. and Mr. Milchick, respectively—would be alongside the show’s cinematographer, Jessica Lee Gagné.

“Then Ben replied later on and he was like, ‘Oh, they’re coming to Toronto. Do you want to see them?’ I said, ‘Oh, actually, I managed to set that up already,’” Powell-Heaton said. “He said, ‘OK, well, come to L.A.’ I mean, he was going to offer that anyway, but the whole thing just kind of worked out.”

Powell-Heaton and her husband flew to Los Angeles to attend the series finale at PaleyFest, a week-long TV festival at the Dolby Theatre—the very same locale where the Oscars are held each year—that several celebrities attend for exclusive screenings and conversations.

For the season two “Severance” finale on Friday, nearly the entire cast attended apart from John Turturro and Christopher Walken, who play Irving B. and Burt Goodman in the show. There was one part of the event were Tillman played with a performance band parading through the theatre—a nod to a particular scene in the finale.

“That was a lot of fun,” Powell-Heaton said. “It was so cool, everybody’s laughing and screaming at the same parts and everything. It was great to watch it in a big theatre with everybody else.”

There was also a meet-and-greet with the cast, Powell-Heaton said, where she got to meet Stiller, Patricia Arquette and “Severance” creator, Dan Erickson.

“I got to kind of chat with whoever I wanted to there,” Powell-Heaton said. “We talked with Adam (Scott) and Britt (Lower) for a bit.”

The whole month felt surreal for Powell-Heaton—“surreal in the best way.”

“I’m so thankful that Ben reached out, and it was really above and beyond,” she said. “It feels like something was definitely fulfilled on my bucket list. I’m very happy about that.”

As for what else is on the bucket list, Powell-Heaton says she and her husband are working toward planning a trip to Japan—it is the only other thing that is on her list at this time.