The MVP: Britt Lower’s Disquieting Duality in Severance

Editor’s Note: Welcome to The MVP, a column where we celebrate the best performances TV has to offer. Whether it be through heart-wrenching outbursts, powerful looks, or perfectly-timed comedy, TV’s most memorable moments are made by the medium’s greatest players—top-billed or otherwise. Join us as we dive deep on our favorite TV performances, past and present:

Come January, Apple TV+’s Severance will finally return to our screens. Remember that one? It stars Adam Scott as a sad guy who chose to ‘sever’ his life memories from his work memories so he could bypass thinking about a terrible loss in his life for big chunks of his day? 

The irony isn’t lost that a drama entirely constructed around humanity’s precarious relationship with our memories hasn’t provided audiences with a new episode in just under three years, so who would remember much of Severance after all this time? The good news is that a first season rewatch confirms that the series holds up extremely well, and it further confirms that comedian/actress Britt Lower, who plays Helly Riggs, is the propulsive, passionate beating heart of the series. 

Yes, those are practically fighting words when Severance boasts a knockout ensemble cast including Patricia Arquette, Tramell Tillman, Christopher Walken, and the aforementioned Scott, whose Mark Scout character is clustered with John Turturro, Zach Cherry and Lower. Together, they are the core four pod of Lumon Industries’ Macrodata Refinement (MDR) worker bees laboring under the fluorescent glow of the company’s severed division.

While Severance is ostensibly constructed around Scott’s Mark, who is the audience’s contextual guide into the strange reality of Lumon Industries’ culture of ‘Innie’ and ‘Outie’ employees, it’s Lower’s Helly whom the audience bonds with from the pilot’s opening moments. She opens the series, waking sprawled out on a stark corporate conference room, unaware of where she is and who she is. The claustrophobia and foreignness of the situation spurs Helly into a panicked fight or flight response that feels far more right than Mark’s passive embrace of his chosen reality. The abject fear and rejection of her situation immediately makes Lower’s Helly the avatar for our own horror and rejection of a scenario that most of us imagine would be exactly how she responds to the controlling reality of a severance life. 

What Lower brings to Helly is not only her full bodied rejection of her character’s situation for the majority of the season—to the point where you can practically read in her eyes the constant mental calculations Helly is crunching to figure out escape options—but also her relative anonymity as a performer amongst her more famous co-stars. Amongst the core four, Lower is the least known from her prior roles, and that’s so important with a character like Helly, where not having any prior baggage in our heads allows us to believe the character without distraction. 

That blank slate quality that Lower could only give Severance at this point in her career allows Helly to come across to both the audience and her co-workers as a perplexing conundrum. This fiercely intelligent woman is so unrelentingly persistent in attempting to best Lumon’s systems for keeping ‘Innies’ placid and contained, that she single-handedly makes us question the enthusiastic consent we’re led to believe comes with anyone who chooses to sever themselves. That’s further reinforced in the shattering episode “In Perpetuity,” where Helly is sent to the severed break room to be punished for her constant jail break attempts to get in touch with her ‘Outie’ self. The sequence is a masterclass in tension and vulnerability because of Lower’s breathtaking defiance in the face of supervisor Seth Milchic’s need to break her. It also earns the audience’s trust of Helly as a reliable narrator—someone the audience can believe as she questions everything she encounters and is told to believe. 

Our belief in Helly is what earns the reveal of her ‘Outie’ self in the season finale, “The We We Are.” Without the work that Lower does all season long to make us fall in love—much like Mark—with Helly’s grit, tenacity and coal black humor,  it would be easy to see a very different public and critical response to the first season of the series. It’s Helly’s emotional arc stridently guiding us like a lamp into the enigmatic darkness of Lumon’s secret that adds the fire to Severance’s premise. So when we find out that Helly is actually Helena Eagan, the complicit daughter of Lumon CEO Jame Eagan (Michael Siberry), it lands like a betrayal to not only her co-workers but to us, who believed that she was the righteous breaker of the systems meant to oppress us. That she could be the oppressor is a twist for the ages that Lower makes possible through her performance, and in turn makes us even more excited to see who Helena is in Season 2.

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on X @TaraDBennett, Blue Sky @tarabennett.bsky.social or Instagram @TaraDBen

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