Spoilers ahead for “Severance” Season 2, Episode 10.
Heading into Season 2, “Severance” star Tramell Tillman had one request for series creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller: “Please don’t make me dance in Season 2.”
“The Music Dance Experience [in Season 1] was so iconic, and I loved how people embraced that moment,” Tillman told TheWrap. “It has become meme-ed over and over and over again, it’s on T-shirts and whatnot. It’s beautiful. But there are some things that you can’t recreate.”
Tillman was adamant that he didn’t want to set up the expectation that Mr. Milchick dances every season. But when Stiller mentioned he was bringing in a marching band for the Season 2 finale, Tillman started to change his tune.
“I got excited. I sat up. I said, ‘Well, wait, what is this marching band? Is this a military-style marching band? Is this a band that’s a similar to those at HBCUs?” Tillman said. When he saw how “vastly different” the music was in this finale, that cemented his revised decision.
Season 1’s Music Dance Experience is presented as a moment of team-building for MDR employees. But in comparison, Mr. Milchick leading the marching band in the Season 2 finale is a moment of celebration almost specifically for him. After a near suicide, a full-blown rebellion and a termination, the MDR team has finally completed Cold Harbor on Mr. Milchick’s watch.
“This is an opportunity for audiences to see how Milchick is still wrestling with his connection, his identity, with Lumon,” Tillman said. “So he presents with Kier in a very military way, a traditional way. But then with ‘The Ballad of Ambrose and Gunnel,’ we get to see him let his hair down. He throws down as if he is at a HBCU, as if he’s at Jackson State University and he’s a drum major part of the Sonic Boom of the South. It was so much fun to embody that.”
Race isn’t a topic that’s typically at the forefront of “Severance,” but it’s one that’s always been integral to the character of Mr. Milchick. When Tillman first saw the breakdown of his character from Erickson and Stiller, the only “specific detail” about Seth Milchick was that he was Black.
“It was important to the creatives that this character be African American, but in Season 1, there wasn’t anything in the script that suggested that he was Black, that identified his culture,” Tillman explained. “So we started having the conversation of the need for him to be Black. Why is that important? What does that mean for the world of Lumon and the town of Kier?”
Those conversations led to Tillman and Stiller talking about code-switching, the process of altering your speaking patterns depending on your audience. Code-switching can refer to something as universal as acting more formal around your boss versus your friends, but the term is often used the Black community to describe sounding more white in certain environments, such as workplaces. For the linguistically obsessed Mr. Milchick, Tillman understood that how the character spoke to different people was important.
“His interactions with Dylan [Zach Cherry] may be a bit different versus interactions with Helly [Britt Lower], because of her identity, but also with Petey [Yul Vazquez], with Irving [John Turturro], with Mark [Adam Scott] and the other innies,” he said.
Tillman sees his character in the midst of what he’s dubbed Mr. Milchick’s “awakening.” The process started in Season 1, when Mr. Milchick saw the racist paintings within the depths of Lumon. It was further sparked by his performance review, which criticized him on everything from his paper clip usage to the size of his words.
“The first line of the series is, ‘Who are you?’ Especially in Season 2, we’re discovering how Milchick is learning his identity as it relates to this corporation. I believe throughout the journey that he is discovering who he is,” Tillman said. “Those paintings are the first instance that we see, in the world of Lumon, race being addressed. We see how it affects the few people of color that are in leadership positions at that moment.”
It’s this desperation to prove he belongs at Lumon that led to Mr. Milchick planning his “calamitous” ORTBO and becoming so well-versed on Kier’s history. “That really speaks to his need to keep the job and what he’s willing to do in order to maintain his position and rank. Part of that is to change his speech, change a part of his identity,” Tillman explained.
But as the series progresses, Mr. Milchick’s dedication to Lumon seems to be wavering. There’s the scene earlier this season when the middle manager tells his boss to “Devour feculence,” a line that made Tillman laugh when he first read it. But even the marching band celebration comes with a tinge of resentment. Mr. Milchick introduces the MDR celebration by doing a standup routine with the statue of Kier. As their back-and-forth continues, Mr. Milchick’s jabs become colder and more pointed.
“That was a fun moment because this was my first time acting with Ben Stiller operating the Kier statue,” Tillman said, explaining that the director was watching the scene from behind a wall. “He would move the statue based on how I would move because we really wanted to create this vaudevillian act.”
However, we’re still a while from full-blown rebellion from this particular manager. After distracting Mr. Milchick so Mark can escape, Helly and Dylan trap their boss in the bathroom behind a vending machine. As the Choreography and Merriment department continues to play, he repeatedly and violently hurls himself at the obstruction.
“I actually bruised a rib,” Tillman revealed, clarifying that the accident was “totally my fault.”
“Adrenaline was going, and I really went ham on that vending machine. Me knocking it down was not intentional, but that’s exactly what happened,” he said. “The vending machine was supposed to fall a different way. But that energy, I just tapped in and I knocked the hell out of that thing like a superhero.” That take was the one the “Severance” team ultimately used.
Looking ahead to Season 3, Tillman believes that Mr. Milchick is in a “very precarious situation.” “Mark is missing. Helly cannot be found — after she rounded up Choreography and Merriment against me, she ran away. Now Milchick is left with an angry mob of people who have musical instruments as weapons and a very disgruntled Dylan,” Tillman said. “He’s got to tap into some of these wiles, the probity and a lot of skill in order to get out of this situation.”
“Severance” Season 1 and 2 are now streaming on Apple TV+.
