‘Severance’ Secret Weapon Britt Lower Reveals Her Wild Side

The sustained eye contact is unnerving. It was Britt Lower‘s idea. I met the actress five minutes ago, and as soon as we took a seat on a riverfront bench in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she put her iced matcha down and pulled art supplies from her tote bag. As a rapport- building exercise, she proposed that we draw each other’s portrait without looking at the paper. She set a timer for three minutes, a mortifyingly long time to be looking directly at someone, which gets progressively less awkward as I realize that she seems completely at ease.

My perspective, staring directly into Lower’s hazel-green irises, framed by her angular cheekbones and copper bangs, is one viewers of Apple TV+’s Severance know well. It’s the face of Helly R, so often seen in close-up on the elevator to the Severed Floor of Lumon industries, her eyes flickering ever so slightly as the person she was on the outside (her “outie”) cedes her consciousness to a version of her that knows only the drudgeries of office life (her “innie”). Lower’s electric performance in the role earned her an Emmy nomination, one of 27 garnered by the show, the second-highest number of nominations for any kind of TV show in a single year.

The sophomore season of the brain-bending show, created by Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson, was Apple TV+’s most watched series worldwide ever, according to the streamer. How does she explain its success? “I have so many answers, but the best one I can think of is that it’s a show about what makes us human,” she says, continuing to sketch. The premise of the series — that our work life and home life can literally be two separate lives — speaks to a duality she says is within all of us, at least within her.

“I have this part of me that just wants to make a nest all the time and hunker down,” she says. “And then there’s this other part of me that just always wants to be driving across the country with my trailer hitched to the back of my car and, like, exploring things. So I have these two sides: the rule follower versus the rebel. I think most people do.”

Finding stardom at 40 — after a largely under-the-radar career of scene-stealing small roles — hasn’t tamed her wanderlust. There’s a reason she calls Helly R her “soulmate.” Like her trapped counterpart, she’s ever alert to the possibility of escape from conformity, alive to surreal moments that pierce the mundane and fill her with wonderment. Between seasons, Lower has literally run off to join a circus, a community of itinerant artists to whom she feels deeply connected (and who are also big on eye contact): “I love to watch people do incredible things and test the limits of what a human body can do.”

She dreams of returning to the circus before season three starts shooting — if only she weren’t so busy these days. In two hours, she’s heading back to the Toronto set of I Will Find You, a Netflix series based on a Harlan Coben thriller in which she plays a journalist. Maybe this is why she appears to be studying me.

In my peripheral vision, I clock the confidence of her pen strokes. No surprise: Her mother is an artist, and the two started a face-painting business together. “I really enjoy art as a way to connect,” she says. This is the skill she chose to demonstrate on Conan O’Brien in her first talk show appearance, in 2017, when promoting the FXX comedy Man Seeking Woman. She ended up showing off not just her artistry but her improv-honed comedy instincts.

“At one point, I told him to close his mouth because I was painting on his mouth,” she recalls. “The producers, I’m sure, were freaking out because I’ve just told the talk show host to stop talking.”

We reveal our artwork. My drawing is laughably bad (again, I wasn’t allowed to look). Hers nails me.

“The exercise that you had together, that is totally on brand for Britt,” says Tramell Tillman, Lower’s Severance castmate and fellow Emmy nominee who plays office supervisor Seth Milchick on the show. “She finds the humanity.” The two bonded from the get-go while filming the first season, at the height of COVID-19. “We had a text thread called The Freshman Class,” Tillman says, “and it was pretty much a group of us who were, for lack of a better word, the newbies to this whole television industry,” amid an intimidating cast of such seasoned film and television stars like Adam Scott, John Turturro and Christopher Walken. “It was so hectic during the pandemic. She doesn’t know this, but there were times where I felt like I was going to have a panic attack on set, and she would just come over and talk to me, not knowing what was going on with me, but she would just sit with me, and her soothing nature really helped alleviate a lot of the tension I was dealing with.”

One impish way Lower calmed her castmates’ nerves was to challenge them, during interminable press junkets, to insert as many extraneous vocabulary words — e.g., “sesquipedalian” — as possible into their interviews to break up the monotony. “She constantly reminds me and our entire cast and crew that this is supposed to be fun — it’s play,” says Tillman, who despite portraying an exceptionally eloquent character in the show didn’t win the vocab competition.

“Patricia [Arquette] got all of the words into her answer at one point,” Lower recalls. “She was the best at it.”

Scott, who plays her innie’s love interest, Mark S, says: “Britt is someone that’s particularly preoccupied with how everyone else around her is doing, yeah. It’s kind of taking care of those that she’s working with.”

***

Lower will talk about work all day but hesitates to reveal much about Britt L’s outie. “In the spirit of Severance, I do like to keep my private life separate,” she says. She lives (mostly) in Brooklyn with a British hairstylist — whom she met when he did her hair for the Emmys a few years ago — and her stepchildren. The pair quietly married last year, a fact that has not yet percolated to her Wikipedia page.

Lower is more forthcoming about her childhood, which by her account sounds both happy and feral. “I grew up in a forest,” she says. She was raised with her older brother in the small town of Heyworth, Illinois (population 2,791), in a house her parents built, surrounded by acres of woodland. “A lot of my childhood was, like, climbing trees and running around in the woods,” she adds.

The actress offered a glimpse of this wild existence in the music video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ song “Wolf,” released in 2022, shortly after Severance‘s first season. In it, she plays a put-together housewife imprisoned in domestic ennui who impulsively follows a blue jay into the wilderness and gives in to her animalistic nature, prowling barefoot through moss, leaves in her hair, cuts on her face, mud splattered on her torn white sheath dress. Commenters were quick to note the parallels with Helly R — particularly her much-memed forward-tilting lope — but what the characters have most in common is Lower’s own freewheeling spirit, born of her sylvan childhood. “I felt really comfortable there,” she says.

She was an athlete in high school: a dancer, a high-jumper, a cheerleader, but primarily a basketball player — a good one, from the sound of it, sufficiently skilled to consider playing for a small college. But her senior year, she auditioned for a community theater production of Gypsy and landed the lead. She fell in love with acting and had to make a choice: the court or the stage.

“I love playing basketball, but I couldn’t really tell you about any single game that I’ve played,” she says, as we walk past a particularly intense pickup game in Greenpoint. “But I could tell you the roles that I’ve played, the stories that I’ve been a part of. And at that point in my life, I was like, ‘I want to commit to storytelling, because that’s scarier to me.’ “

Fear — or rather conquering fear — is a prime motivator for Lower. “Healthy fear,” she specifies. “The kind of scary that isn’t life-threatening, but you know if you face it, it’s going to lead you toward a growth edge, and you will learn a lot.”

After attending college at Northwestern, she moved to New York for the improv scene and performed with Upright Citizens Brigade and the Magnet Theater, relishing the role of the straight man, showcasing the wackiness of her fellow performers. (She still regularly performs in Brooklyn with a troupe of Northwestern improv alums called the Frat Boyz, with frequent appearances by her Severance castmate Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan G.) But screen dreams beckoned, and she became bicoastal, devoting years to the Hollywood hustle of audition and rejection. The occasional meaty supporting part kept her in the game, including a recurring role on the CBS police procedural Unforgettable (2011-2016).

The chewiest came in 2015, when she was cast in the off-the-wall FXX comedy Man Seeking Woman as the protagonist’s lovelorn sister. “The moment we saw Britt read for it, we were desperate to hire her, and I think she might have been the first person we cast — we were terrified of losing her,” says creator Simon Rich.

“She was always committed, always believable, no matter how surreal or unnatural the premise was. Like, whether she was battling aliens, robbing a grave or having an affair with Santa Claus, she was always completely dialed into the emotion at the heart of the premise.”

In that show, she plays heartache for laughs. But around the same time, she was experiencing her own. After a broken engagement, she did what she’d always dreamed of doing and drove across the country on her own. Her original destination was the final Barnum & Bailey show (it has since reopened without animals). But then she began visiting other, smaller circuses and insinuated herself into the community of acrobats, clowns and jugglers. She eventually became a First of May, circus slang for a rookie performer, with Circus Flora in St. Louis. She later served as a kind of ringmaster/clown for the Shoestring Circus in Bellingham, Washington, guiding visitors through the narrative.

The unflinching support her Severance castmates felt from her, she felt from the circus. “They have each other’s backs,” she says. “There’s a visceral interdependence. They are literally putting their lives in each other’s hands. It’s like, all right, I’m trusting that you’re going to catch me on the other side of that.”

Lower sees Hollywood as an extension of this world: “Circus tends to travel around, right? But we also do that in TV and film, like, the backlot of a TV set: Everything’s on wheels, there are tents, there’s the DIT booth, the crew have all these wonderful vests with all the tools because they have to be ready to move at any time.”

When I suggest that this vibrant world of craftspeople and performers is increasingly under threat from artificial intelligence, she pauses for a moment. “Whenever I think about the way I feel watching someone walk across a tightrope, I don’t feel nervous about AI,” she says, emphasizing the human stakes at the core of all valuable art.

Lower’s heartbreak and ensuing big-top epiphany inspired her experimental short, Circus Person, an autobiographical love letter to the people she calls “mobile artists,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020. As she was editing the film, her agent, Jo Yao of UTA, sent her the script for the Severance pilot.

“It’s a long shot,” she warned her.

After going through it, “I was like, ‘OK, well, this is the best one I’ve ever read.’ “

Yao encouraged Lower to send a self-taped audition, which the actress recorded from her bathroom. They gave her scenes to read from a later episode, throwing her into the show’s conceptual deep end without context: “I remember being perplexed by what ‘scary numbers’ were.”

She felt a close kinship with the character of Helly and was wary of getting too attached, given the odds of landing any given role, let alone one as rewarding as this one.

The tape earned her a callback and a chemistry read with Scott. Afterward, she called her best friend: “I made Ben Stiller laugh!” She now says, “That was the win.”

Lower was roasting a sweet potato when she got a call from her team. Sometimes, having your agent, lawyer and manager on the same call means good news. Sometimes, it means condolences.

“I was at that point where there had been, like, three or four jobs that year that had just gone a different direction,” says Lower. “I had developed that kind of resilience that you build from rejection, and you’re just like, ‘OK, cool, it wasn’t meant to be.’ “

When they told her she’d gotten the part, she fell to her knees and cried: “It was a hardwood floor, so my knees hurt.” They asked her how she was going to celebrate. Through tears and laughter, she said, “I’m going to eat a sweet potato.”

***

With little else to do during COVID confinement but study the scripts, Lower painstakingly wrote her lines down by hand, along with word clouds of the emotions — OUTRAGE, LIVID, BREAK OUT — she intended to express from the inside out. By the time filming began, she had memorized all nine scripts. She used her free mornings on shoot days to paint abstract watercolors of Helly R’s mindset.

Lower put a Lumon-esque amount of work into the data refinement of her character’s inner lives. For the opening scene of the pilot, which finds a disoriented Helly struggling to escape from a locked and empty conference room as a voice questions her over the intercom, Lower studied video of police interrogations. The character’s defiance, her desire to break free, came more naturally to Lower than the role of Helly’s outie, the privileged Lumon scion Helena Eagan, who takes on more prominence in season two. “That felt just way different from my own experience, and so I had to use my imagination a lot more,” she says. “I had to do a lot more research on what it’s like to grow up in a high-control group.” She studied Tilda Swinton’s overrefined courtier in Orlando and listened to “a lot of classical music.”

The nested roles, with Helena passing herself off as Helly at one point, posed a mind fuck of an acting challenge. “What’s the word?” Lower asks. “Recursive? I’m Britt, who’s embodying Helena pretending to be Helly, and Helly is this suppressed rebel inside of Helena, so she has access to it, to some extent. But Helena’s bloodline is also embedded in Helly …” It is all in the nuances, and Lower says Stiller was deeply attuned to them: “He had a really good finger on the pulse of when I was being Helena too much.”

The intensity of her emotional preparation — drawn from the Stanislavski-based techniques she learned from filmmaking and acting coach Joan Scheckel — could easily have inspired eye rolls, or worse, from her castmates. With the caveat that they are very good actors, they show zero indication that was the case. Far from it.

“I don’t really ask people what they do to prepare — I kind of feel like it’s none of my business, nor do I assume anyone’s interested in what I do,” says Scott.

If any common theme emerges, it’s how Lower made the often grueling shoot days on Severance not just tolerable but enjoyable.

“Being under those fluorescent lights all day doing this material that’s always difficult and always more complicated than you thought, you never get off easy with a scene on Severance,” Scott says. “So having someone like Britt, who’s loose and fun, makes the whole thing doable in the first place.”

Scott, who worked in sitcoms for years, from Party Down to Parks and Recreation, says Lower has a unique comic agility, even within the context of a heady drama. “Britt, being a naturally gifted comedian, can go in there and dig out laughs where no one thought they might be hiding,” he says. “And the fact that Helly is as funny as she is, is something that I can’t imagine the character without.”

Turturro, whose dressing room was next to Lower’s, became a kind of mentor to the actress, sharing everything from his vocal warm-up exercises to career advice learned the hard way from decades in the business. He’s long forgiven her for socking him in the abdomen — at his insistence — harder than he’d expected while horsing around behind the scenes. (Says Lower, “When John Turturro asks you to punch him in the stomach, you do!” Wise words.)

Turturro credits Stiller and Erickson for taking a risk on the relative unknown. “I think she’s a secret weapon on the show,” he says.

“She has this gamine quality, you know, like Shirley MacLaine or Jeanne Moreau. There’s something that people could really take advantage of.” The veteran actor and filmmaker says he wants to direct her in whatever he does next. He’ll have to get in line. In addition to Severance season three, she’s got the Netflix thriller, a psychological horror movie with Jamie Lee Curtis (Sender) and her own plan to turn Circus Person into a feature film.

Lower is no longer a First of May in the Hollywood circus. She’s a ringleader of the most lauded show on television. She’s already got an Emmy nomination in the bag, and — assuming the Emmys keep playing favorites as they have in recent years — stands to earn a few more. She’s locked into a successful career, and with ever more shows and films to promote, junkets to power through and awards to campaign for, one has to wonder how that sits with the rebel within her? Does she ever think about leaving it all and permanently joining the circus?

“All the time.”

This story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.