- Tramell Tillman plays the inscrutable Seth Milchick on “Severance.”
- Fans don’t know whether Milchick is a good guy or a bad guy.
- Tillman told BI that uncertainty fuels his performance: “This is a big exercise in faith and in trust.”
Warning: Major spoilers ahead for the season two finale of “Severance.”
In a show filled with inscrutable characters, no one is harder to read than “Severance” fan-favorite Seth Milchick. For actor Tramell Tillman, that means he’s doing his job right.
The Apple TV+ series became a critical sensation when it premiered in 2022, landing on many lists of the year’s best TV and cultivating an extremely dedicated audience. Because “Severance” functions as both a brilliant send-up of corporate culture and a mystery box of unanswered questions, bizarre moments (those goats!), and cryptic dialogue, it’s ideal fodder for fan theories. But like any good middle manager, Tillman is trying his best to stay professional and not engage with them.
One of the biggest mysteries for fans is whether Milchick, the straight-laced, verbose Lumon Industries manager, is a good guy or a bad guy. Some are convinced that he’s a loyal Lumon soldier, while others believe he’s a double agent working against the company from the inside.
As it turns out, Tillman doesn’t know, either.
“This is a big exercise in faith and in trust,”Tillman told Business Insider.
“I, like the fans, make guesses and theories. I’m usually wrong about them, so I always keep it to myself,” Tillman continued. “But I do not have the information.”
In fact, Tillman says it’s actually ideal not to have all the answers as an actor — that uncertainty helps him give a subtle, layered performance. “The creative process is so tender and it can easily become a moment where you have too many cooks in the kitchen,” he said.
Despite rumblings of an “endgame” for how Mark’s journey inside Lumon will ultimately conclude, the show is also malleable. Creator Dan Erickson, who also wrote the season two finale, has said that while the endgame for the show hasn’t changed, the twists and turns along the way have taken shape as the show is actually shooting. Part of that is thanks to input from the actors.
“This experience, from season one to now, has always been this living, breathing, artistic exploration,” Tillman said. “There are always changes, there’s always dialogue, and there’s always collaboration.”
The “Severance” cast makes choices, including some that Erickson didn’t map out himself, that are then picked up and overanalyzed by ever-vigilant viewers, who are constantly trying to solve the show’s mysteries on places like Reddit.
While Tillman appreciates the “sheer brilliance” of how attuned the fans are to the show’s details, he says their attention can be a double-edged sword. In fact, Tillman said the creators tell the cast to be careful about what they’re reading online, because a viewer making a connection that may or may not actually be there may influence their performance.
“A lot of the theories, and the ideas and the numbers and the connection to history and to Kier, some may just be a fluke,” Tillman told BI. “And I’ll read it and I’m thinking, ‘Wait, did they intend for that color to be used here, or did they intend that?’ I was like, ‘Wait, I played that scene all wrong. Wait a minute, let me go back.’ And it’s like, no.”
While Tillman typically avoids fan theories so they don’t color his performance, he admits that being asked about them intensifies his curiosity to look them up. One especially weird theory he’s seen is that there are actually several versions of Milchick running around the office and that they start off as goats. (He doesn’t think that one’s true, for what it’s worth.)
Throughout “Severance” season two, Milchick is increasingly torn between being a loyal Lumon employee and his burgeoning apparent anger at the slights against him — the racist Kier paintings, getting a negative performance review, and his verbal sparring with Robot Kier in the finale.
Tillman says he doesn’t know if there’s anything to the theories that Milchick is a secret double agent already working against Lumon from the inside, or whether Milchick is on a path that will ultimately lead him to turn against the company once and for all, but he enjoys playing into that duality as an actor.
“This is a man who is a keeper of secrets. And for me, if you keep a lot of secrets, there’s a tendency to play your cards very close to the chest because either you don’t want people to know that you have all the secrets or you don’t want anyone to see your secrets,” Tillman said.
“And he is, of course, a representation of this Lumon culture. And you notice that everyone in Lumon is pretty stoic. They’re very inscrutable. So he is an embodiment of that.”
A company man to his core!
The “Severance” season two finale is now streaming on Apple TV+.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Read the full article here
