[This story contains spoilers through season two, episode six of Severance.]
Is she Helly R? Is she Helena Eagan? Aren’t they basically the same person? The answers, in order are yes, also yes, physically yes, but spiritually no. If the great John Noble’s Fields taught us anything in this week’s Severance, it’s this: innies have souls, just as outies do — and if an innie can go to Heaven while an outie goes to Hell, well, we’re pretty sure where Helly and Helena are winding up, respectively.
At least, that’s the score as it stands through six episodes of Severance season two, as one of the key protagonists has taken a turn as the new big bad: Britt Lower as Helly and Helena, the newest member of the Microdata Refinement team, as well as the woman all but completely in charge of Lumon Industries. For the first half of season two, outie Helena infiltrated innie Helly’s life, acting as a spy to gather intelligence against the Microdat revolutionaries. After her secret identity was outed in nearly fatal fashion, Helena allowed Helly to return to the severed floor, but not without taking shots at the innies: “They aren’t people; they’re fucking animals.”
Is that how Helena actually feels about Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and their recently laid off colleague Irving (John Turturro)? Or is this all a defense mechanism for the heir apparent to the Eagan empire? The way Britt Lower sees it, the answer is … well, again, yes and yes. Like the severance technology at the heart of the show, a person can be two people at once, literally in the case of Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller‘s Apple TV+ thriller. In the chat with THR below, Lower expands on all that, and everything else that brought Helly back to work.
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What do you remember about your first thoughts approaching season two, and playing these very different versions of the same character?
Well, it was super interesting to start the work of navigating the inner landscape of these two parts of the same person. How much they share, how much they contrast and what it looks like when one is stepping into the perspective of the other and blending into an environment that Helly R has navigated, into connections that Helly R has earned. Helena is getting to see what it’s like to walk around the world in the shoes of a revolutionary, and that was exciting to me. The idea that these two parts of the same person that have started waging a war against each other in season one are now having to kind of see what it’s like to be in each other’s perspective.
We saw Helena in bits and pieces throughout season one. How did your understanding of her start to shift in season two?
Her actions are pretty loud even in season one. But you don’t ever see Helena alone until season two. It’s in episode two, I think, where you see her watching the video of Helly and Mark at the elevator. So you really, as a viewer, don’t get a very clear sense of her because she’s having to wear a lot of masks all of the other times that we see her. But in that moment, those masks are stripped away and she’s by herself. I think I came to understand in that moment how much isolation and loneliness and just coldness she’s having to endure. I tried to have empathy for her being trapped within the same company in the same way that the innies are, just in a very different way. I think getting to step in Helly’s shoes has awakened her by the time we get to the ORTBO. She’s now kind of at odds with what the company wants her to be doing and what she, deep down, wants to be doing. All of that was super interesting, like a five-dimensional chess game that we were inventing as we went with new rules.
In “Woe’s Hollow,” before she’s revealed, Helena gifts Irving with a snow lion. There’s some debate about if Helena meant to make a kind gesture or if this was just another attempt at blending in.
I think it’s for the viewer to decide for themselves. But I do think Helena has been changed by what she’s experienced, and you can extrapolate what that chosen family that Mark, Helly, Dylan and Irving created together must have felt like for someone like Helena, whose given family dynamic is so painful. I do think she’s seeking approval from Irving. He’s the only one who hasn’t come around to accepting her. There are some parallels with her relationship to her father and the approval and that she doesn’t get from him. So I think that scene is her attempt, and it’s even more painful when this guy doesn’t respond in the way she hopes. But Irving has been split open after season one. His heart has been broken, so he’s really kind of raw and open and sensitive to the details around him. It made sense to me that he was the one who picked up on her. He and Helly in season one do have this really tender, loving dynamic that is very familial. So he’s kind of seeing it from a different point of view than Mark and Dylan who are little bit distracted by their own journeys of being discovered, and who they are on the outside.
Adam Scott and Britt Lower in Severance season two, episode six, “Attila.”
Apple TV+
How did you make the shift when you started playing scenes as Helly again? Though I know the show is not always shot in sequence…
We do film out of order, but we spent a good portion of the first half of the season with the first few episodes. So yes, I was primarily with Helena in Helena’s perspective, and then coming back to Helly in episode five, and immediately asking “A, who the fuck are you” to [Ms. Huang]. That felt like the kind of purest brushstroke in the Helly world, and it felt refreshing to be back in her, just in her posture and the way she moves through the world.
Helly’s always on a mission. She’s always moving forward. She very rarely hesitates, except for maybe in matters of the heart. But to have her kind of stomping through the hallways again? It felt good. And then it was really disorienting in that episode, because no one’s catching her up yet. She’s kind of trying to put the pieces together and no one’s behaving like who they were [in the season one finale, which was] just moments ago for her really. So this past episode becomes kind of putting all the pieces together and dealing with the shock and betrayal of what’s happened to her.
There was so much debate online about who we were watching, Helly or Helena. How much of that did you track?
It was really cool to hear and see how the fans have put on their detective caps, just finding those Easter eggs that we worked really closely on to figure out which ones were too much and which ones were just right. Our fans are so smart. It’s so cool to see what resonated for people and the folks who were kind of onto it from the start: “Hey, that’s not my Helly!” A friend of mine said, “I feel like I betrayed Helly! I should have known!”
It’s true! When we see Helly instead of Helena on the severed floor, it’s just so clear how different they are.
She’s so in touch with the mission, the ethics, and she’s just on the path of justice. Immediately upon finding out that Ms. Casey is Mark’s outtie’s wife, she’s just right on it. She’s like, “Well, what are we going to do?” There’s no hesitation, and she’s direct. Helena was having to hesitate and look and wait and observe and try to blend in. So those were all written into the backbone of the story, but then the modulation became my job of finding the inner world. It’s like an Adobe Photoshop image, and I’m increasing the saturation here or lightening up the shadows here. It’s the same image, but we’re playing with the levels.
Many actors who play villains say they can’t see their characters that way, that they have to empathize with their role to a degree. It’s complicated in this case, though, because both Helly and Helena inhabit the same physical form. So how do you balance that equation? You started as Helly, how do you not root for her over Helena?
I come at it from the place where we’re often our own worst enemy. You’re your own worst critic. That’s so real. And we’ve all had those moments where we do something and we look back on it and we’re like, “Oh, that wasn’t the best version of myself.” Or, “Wow, I really showed up differently in that space.” And trying to start from a place of empathy of like, these are two parts of the same person who are both trapped in their circumstances in really different ways. And while you think that Helena might have control over the situation, you see the ways in which, between her father and the company, she’s trapped as well, and also not free to express herself in the way that Helly does. Helly doesn’t care what anyone thinks. What could be more free than that?
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Severance is now streaming six episodes of season two on Apple TV+, and releases new episodes on Fridays. Follow along with THR‘s season coverage.