“Severance” presents Lumon middle manager Seth Milchick as an enigma. The first season makes it seem like he lives in the office since we never see him at home. Only in recent episodes have details about his life beyond the Severed floor been shown, but not many.
In the second season premiere, the writers shoot down one theory that dominated message board threads in Season 1, establishing that he is “un-severed” – meaning that unlike his direct reports in Macrodata Refinement, including Mark S. (Adam Scott), Helly R. (Britt Lower), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry) and Irving B. (John Turturro), his consciousness hasn’t been surgically divided between work and off-hours.
We’ve seen him ride his motorcycle through the company town named for Lumon’s founder Kier Eagan. Milchick also knows a few people outside of work well enough to let them call him by his first name, Seth. His team addresses him only as Mr. Milchick.
Tillman shared that after getting the role, he noticed nothing in the scripts specifically leaned into Milchick’s Blackness.
That formality is reflected in his manner of speech, too. Whenever simpler terminology would suffice, Milchick chooses every florid alternative, as when he expresses gratitude for his recent promotion: “I would like to thank the board humbly for my recent betterment.”
But Tramell Tillman’s initial take on Milchick drilled to a deeper level. In a recent Zoom conversation, Tillman shared that after getting the role, he noticed nothing in the scripts specifically leaned into Milchick’s Blackness. (The audition call described him as “African American, 20s to 50s, and an enthusiastic company man.”) So he posed some questions to series creator Dan Erickson and executive producers Ben Stiller and Mark Friedman.
“This character is specifically Black, but is he aware that he is Black? And what is our relationship to race in this world of this show?” Tillman recalled asking them. “How are we attending to that in the town of Kier which turns out to be racially diverse — is this a hodgepodge of different cultures and we don't speak about it, or are we identifying it?”
Tramell Tillman in "Severance" (Apple TV+)
Erickson and the writers begin to address those questions with a disconcerting scene in the third episode, “Who Is Alive?” It starts when a frustrated Milchick is ambushed by the company’s public relations representative Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander), who turns up in his office unannounced with the invisible Lumon board silently listening in.
Like Milchick, Natalie is another non-white employee in a workplace where few of her coworkers look like her. But where Milchick’s manner is purposefully careful, Natalie is mechanical and unerring. She conveys her positivity with a smile as sparkly and sharp as cut crystal.
The board is “jubilant at your ascendance,” Natalie tells Milchick, “and wants you to feel appreciated.” To Lumon’s bosses, this means connecting Milchick to the company’s history. “To that end, please accept from the board these inclusively re-canonicalized paintings intended to help you see yourself in Kier, our founder.”
Witnessing what happens next could trigger sympathetic dissociation. Milchick opens the box, removes the vellum covering the first painting, and is confronted with a version of Kier Eagan’s portrait — in blackface. His complexion is painted dark brown and his hairline and mustache are redrawn to resemble Milchick’s. The eyes, however, remain a piercing, hauntingly unnatural shade of blue.
The sublimated horror on Milchick’s face is entirely honest since the camera captures the first time the actor saw those portraits too. At least Tillman had an inkling they were coming. “What I appreciate is that they asked me how I felt about it,” Tillman said.
His face provides the answer. Tillman’s left eye twitches as Milchick whispers, “Oh…oh my,” and the aghast, slight uptick of one eyebrow says what his mouth can’t when Natalie chirps, “The board wishes to express that I, Natalie, received this same gift upon receipt of my current position — and found it extremely moving.”
“I’m grateful,” he responds in a near whisper. “It’s meaningful to see myself . . . reflected in . . .” Milchick can’t find the words but it doesn’t matter — the board hangs up on him before he can finish, letting us know how much he’s worth to his superiors.
“One thing that was really important for me was to be sure that we did not ignore the ramifications of the racial element that this character is enduring in this moment, and whether or not we fully addressed it and put a bow on it in this season was less important,” the actor added. “But what was really clear is that I didn't want to brush it away.”
“Severance,” for all its surrealist scenery, reflects a version of American corporate life that isn’t too far removed from what the show portrays. Each company’s culture has uniquely weird habits and reflexive traditions. Most workers run down their days repeating the same tasks without thinking too much about their job’s meaning, focusing instead on productivity out of fear or in pursuit of incentives.
Mr. Milchick is another familiar type — the striving middle manager fluent in emotionally neutral corporate speak, eager to demonstrate his worth and perilously reliant on his boss’ validation. To Tillman, the portraits signal that all of Milchick’s efforts to prove he’s Lumon leadership material will never be enough.
“These pictures are the board’s way of trying to accept me and embrace me and include me in their history and work on tolerance, if you will,” he pointed out, “but it's also them being willing to take history and, in a way, whitewash it so that it's totally accepting and, ‘This is totally fine.’”
“So in a way,” he continued, “they decrease the value of who Kier is in order to make me feel accepted, but do so in a way that makes me feel even more isolated: ‘We see you and we want you to be a part of history, but we see you as Black.’”
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Shortly before Donald Trump signed an executive order eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs in federal government, companies including Meta, Walmart, Amazon and McDonalds rolled back their DEI initiatives, with Target recently joining their retreat. The administration and its right-wing media supporters paint diversity as a cultural ill, with Trump even ridiculously blaming DEI for last week’s tragic plane crash in Washington D.C.
Notably other corporations, including Nike and Costco, have loudly stated their intent to maintain their DEI-focused programs, citing the ways that focusing on diversity is good for business. Which it is.
“Severance” uses Milchick to depict another interpretation of corporate diversity that has played out for decades and rarely been portrayed as unsparingly as it is here, which is the tacit demand to assimilate in ways that can equal erasure.
“This the first time we are witnessing a character in this world who happens to not be white, that is being othered. And we're watching it in real-time,” Tillman observed, citing that Natalie has also been othered but seems to have embraced that. She allows the board to verbalize her supposed personal reaction to the same paintings.
“We have to perform in a certain way, and how she feels about it is unclear at the moment,” the actor said.
Tramell Tillman in "Severance" (Apple TV+)
“Severance” is the second show to cast Tillman as a series regular; his first was in 2018’s short-lived “Dietland.” Between the Apple TV+ drama’s popularity and the way his performance gets under your skin, Tillman has also gotten a lot busier. Later this year he’ll appear in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” in an undisclosed role.
Asked whether we’ll see him jump off any skyscrapers, he would only say, “I cannot confirm nor deny.” But he did offer that the work environments were more similar than we might assume.
“There's a meticulousness that both directors have, and there's a passion that both directors have as well,” he said, adding that stepping away from the second season of “Severance” once it wrapped to jump into working with director Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise and the rest of the cast, “felt like I was at home.”
“For me, it was important, if they had not decided on the structure of care when it came to race, that I played a character that was very much aware of his Blackness and his journey to assimilate, his journey to fit into this world embodied by people that do not look like him."
It had to be more fulfilling than the cubicle anxieties Tillman used to contend with. Before he joined “Severance” he worked in nonprofit management. “The job entailed keeping a lot of balls in the air, you know, feeling as if I was an octopus, having to please many people, having to answer to many more people, and having to keep an eye on office camaraderie,” he remembered.
That sounds a lot like Milchick’s workload. We’ve seen him launch morale-boosting dance breaks, greet returning employees with bountiful balloon clusters, and organize fruit deliveries as well as interfacing with the higher-ups. In the new season, he oversees “kindness reforms” in response to the Microdata Refinement team’s Overtime Contingency debacle, during which the workers on the Severed floor found a way to awaken their “innie” consciousness outside the office, where their “outies” live separated from work.
Milchick also appears to be in many places at once, leading to some online speculation that he could be a clone. It’s nothing that sexy, as far we can tell. He’s simply saddled with an array of menial tasks in addition to his management duties. Some of us can relate.
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Watching Tillman in “Severance” might be a different experience for people of color who work in corporate America, especially Black and brown folks. Many know what it’s like to be Milchick – to do everything better than right, to maintain composure in the face of insult, only to one day realize that nothing you do will ever get you the corner office.
Tillman said the character’s expansion sparked a dialogue about what it was like to work in a predominantly white corporate structure and the ways that required him to deal with microaggressions.
He also raised the topic of code-switching. “For me, it was important, if they had not decided on the structure of care when it came to race, that I play a character that was very much aware of his Blackness and his journey to assimilate, his journey to fit into this world embodied by people that do not look like him,” he said.
How Milchick styles his hair, how he speaks how he dresses – “Everything was about him fitting in,” Tillman explained.
He also acknowledges that there’s still plenty left up for discussion regarding Milchick, revealing that he’s read the social media comments calling him evil or speculating about his motivations.
“I've never been interested in pity, and I never wanted to play a character where audiences are led to feel sorry for [him]. That's not interesting to me,” the actor said. ”What I am hoping is that audiences will maybe see themselves in Milchick. I hope that there's a humanity that they witness unfold in him.”
And, true to form, Tillman expresses hope that his character’s arc leads them to ask questions about their lives, such as: How do I participate in a failing system?
What do I allow in my life? What do I ignore?
Is my joy being tampered with?
And, he finishes, Do I find worth in my work? “My hope is that audiences will continue to find ways to implicate themselves within Milchick,” he said, “and see that, you know, we're kind of more alike than we think.”
New episodes of "Severance" stream Fridays on Apple TV+.
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