Severance Doesn’t Work Without Milchick

Tucked in the midpoint of its season-two finale, “Cold Harbor,” is a moment that bottles the disorientation that makes Severance such irresistible television. Seth Milchick, played by Tramell Tillman, meets one of his employees, Dylan (Zach Cherry), in a sterile conference room to resolve the lingering issue of the latter’s resignation request. Despite enduring repeated humiliations from his employer, Lumon Industries, and though he’s oversubscribed, Milchick nevertheless handles the exchange with faultless professionalism. “As it may yield an embarrassing, emotional response in you, and as I am duly swamped, I shall leave you to read it in solitude,” Milchick says, his diction measured and verbose as he slides forward a folder with three exacting fingers. When Dylan takes it, the camera cuts back just as Milchick pivots and darts out the door like a bat out of hell, his ramrod posture still discernible even as the odd framing crops him off. It’s a fleeting and strange beat, cartoonish if it weren’t so unsettling, but one that effectively crystallizes Severance’s surreal tone — and at its center, the Magnetic Mr. Milchick.

As Lumon’s middle-manager par excellence, Tillman was the breakout performer of Severance’s first season. Season two gives the character more power and complications that challenge his sense of self, and Tillman capitalizes on the material, repeatedly seizing the spotlight every second he’s on the screen. Tillman earned himself an Emmy nomination for Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, and though pundits are placing their bets on The White Lotus’s Walton Goggins, Tillman deserves to take up more space in the conversation. Beyond the historic possibility of becoming the first Black actor to win the category, he doesn’t get enough credit for embodying the strange essence of Severance, a show that broke out in no small part due to the boldness of its peculiarities. In a series defined by unusual, carefully calibrated choices, from its mysterious goats to the elliptical nature of its central corporation to the constant presence of archaic language (“Has it verve?” “The most of its flock”), Tillman delivers the performance that feels the most singular.

The exchange with Dylan doesn’t come close to Milchick’s most dazzling showcase. That comes later, in the finale’s unhinged marching-band sequence, in which his electrifying physicality shifts to genuine menace as he tries to break down the vending-machine barricade Helly (Britt Lower) built to prevent Milchick from stopping her and Mark (Adam Scott) from freeing his wife. It’s a distilled version of the force first glimpsed in season one’s “Defiant Jazz” scene, in which Milchick grooves out with Mark, Helly, and the rest of the MDR crew in a corporate-mandated effort at boosting worker morale (or “merriment”). That moment worked in the opposite direction, injecting brief humanity into a character who had until then been cast as a Sphinx-like authority figure.

What makes both scenes pop is their contrast. As Milchick, Tillman holds his body with a statuelike composure, which makes his bursts of movement land with amplified intensity. He is the vessel through which Severance constantly communicates Lumon’s dominance over its workers, his very stillness humming with the implied threat of corporate violence. That threat is made literal in “Cold Harbor” through another character, Mr. Drummond, a hulking Lumon higher-up played by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson who savagely attempts to kill a spying Mark in the series’s most visceral confrontation to date. But Severance keeps Milchick more enigmatic. The danger he represents never fully erupts but instead simmers perpetually beneath the skin. We continue to learn surprisingly little about him, even compared to Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who gets her own standalone episode this season, but the glimpses of Milchick we do see are tantalizing: the sharp leather jacket and motorcycle, the flickers of unease on his face hinting that he recognizes the system’s wrongness, and his fierce defense of traits central to his identity, especially his ornate, loquacious speech. That verbosity can be read as a battleground of race, class, and corporate respectability, and it speaks to Tillman’s performance that it all comes through without the character having to spell it out. His obliqueness is the quality that makes him so consistently compelling, accentuated by how the show never really lets you settle on how you’re supposed to feel about him: Is he an antagonist, a victim, or something in between?

In this, Milchick embodies a crucial facet of Severance’s workplace metaphor. While the show’s sympathies rest squarely with the macrodata refiners as put-upon workers (including even Helly, though the philosophical ambiguity as to whether she can be considered her own person is part of the show’s conceptual fun), Milchick is the consummate middle manager, suspended between the ruthless authority of capital and the moral clarity of labor. His position grows even more complicated in the second season when he’s nominally promoted after Lumon benches Cobel as manager of the severed floor. The “elevation” means little, as he’s immediately wedged between another subordinate, Miss Huang (Sarah Bock), and Mr. Drummond, who looms over him as a corporate enforcer. The effect is a tightening vise. Drummond belittles him after a poor performance review, specifically targeting his speech; Milchick displaces that humiliation onto Miss Huang, and then, in a remarkable scene, onto himself. Alone before a mirror, laboring to internalize Drummond’s order to he simplify his language, the camera zooms in as he repeats a line he once delivered to Ms. Huang, whittling it down with each iteration from “You must eradicate from your essence childish folly” to “You must abandon childish things” to the blunt, simple “Grow up.” A sequence that could very well dance on the edge of hokeyness becomes, in Tillman’s hands, a scene of a man struggling between dueling impulses. His voice gradually descends into a growl as he vibrates with a mixture of pain, anger, and yearning.

Severance may ground its narrative and moral thrust in the plight of its macrodata refiners, but Milchick is in many ways the essence of the show’s thesis, embodying the ways corporate culture twists, consumes, and corrupts all it touches. Nothing about Milchick works without Tillman’s exacting performance, and I’m rooting for him to have a long, unpredictable career. We’ve already seen flashes of what that might look like. In Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning, where he plays the captain of a nuclear submarine Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is trying to commandeer, he delivered the film’s single best acting performance, radiating more chemistry with Cruise in a single scene than all of Hunt’s love interests combined — “Mister, if you’ve come to poke the bear, you’ve come to the right man” — and so much militant erotic charge it could power the nuclear sub they’re inside. That moment, too, capitalizes on Tillman’s ability to radiate intimidation by way of an otherworldly strangeness, a quality that feels exciting in its sheer potential and, in this moment, award-worthy in its own right.