Like everyone who tuned into Severance, I’m accustomed to seeing Britt Lower rendered in cool cinematic lighting in a barren corporate office, her posture primed for escape. On our call in late June, she’s more at ease: Perched with one knee up on a bed of the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her husband and step-children, sipping from a chrome flask of tea, a camo hoodie hanging from the closet door. Her dog Bow-Tie, a teddy brown terrier with a white patch around his neck, lies beside her. At one point she lifts up his docile little body and apologizes for forgetting to introduce us.

Such quotidian surroundings fly in the face of the sets and red carpets she’s been traipsing lately. Yet Lower, herself, is as anticipated. Her signature red micro-bangs sit choppily against her fair skin; her aura stoic, her voice soft. (For those familiar with Severance, in a pendulum between Helly R. and Helena, she veers unwaveringly towards Helly R.).

But although Severance was Lower’s “big break,” the 40-year-old actor has been treading the boards for a long time. After developing an interest in art and the circus while assisting her mom with her face- painting business as a child, she double majored in theater and visual art at Northwestern. “I designed a lot of sets. I was always involved in a student theater group on set making new plays. I was the technical director of one of the theater companies,” she tells me. She then spent almost two decades as a working actress, as a principal cast member in Man Seeking Woman, and smaller roles in the likes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and American Horror Stories. In 2020, on the cusp of landing Severance—having just been turned down for three close-call roles—she wrote, directed, and starred in the 2020 short film Circus Person. “I was like, ‘I just need to make something.’ It’s what they say, isn’t it, for all creatives? ‘Make it yourself if it’s what you want to see.’ And it was in the process of editing my short film, just so fun, so invigorating, and I was in the process of watching myself in the edit too. So I had this more objective eye…That’s when I got the request to make a self-tape for Severance.”

When we speak, Lower has just returned from São Paulo, where she was filming Zero K, a sci-fi film based on a novel of the same title by Don DeLillo. It follows a tech billionaire preparing his dying wife for cryonic preservation, coincidently sharing themes with Severance in terms of experimental scientific intervention, co-starring Caleb Landry Jones, Peter Sarsgaard, and Selton Mello. Lower plays a performance artist who walks around backwards as a countercultural art form. “The minute I heard that was her thing I was like, sign me up. That sounds incredible.”        

On the Severance set, Lower painted and sketched to access her character’s inner life, this time, she took her character’s performance practice to New York. “I got to spend some time practicing walking backwards through the streets of New York City with a choreographer friend of mine, and then doing it in São Paulo was—it’s really trippy. You should try it when you get off the Zoom, just walking around your home backwards. It’s a trip. The interesting thing that someone was saying to me was walking backwards is actually, metaphorically speaking, like walking into the future, because you’re walking into the unknown, whereas walking forwards is like walking into the past because you can see everything that’s already happened. Isn’t that kind of beautiful?”

 Any post-filming rest Lower may have anticipated has been usurped by the press run for I Will Find You (a week before we speak, Lower appeared on the manicured set of The Today Show) a Taken-esque crime thriller in which Lower has a leading role. The limited series follows David Burroughs’ (Sam Worthington) escape from prison after his sister-in-law discovers the son he allegedly killed might be alive. Unlike Severance’s slow burn plot—which relies on easter eggs in the form of mystery goats, slips from stern-faced management, and a dishevelled Gwendoline Christie—I Will Find You is high-octane and commercial. The pilot alone lenses attempted murder, a prison breakout, police corruption, a car chase, and flashbacks to the murder of a young child. After airing on Netflix at the end of June, the show quickly climbed to number one. When we speak I’m a little sleep deprived on account of the heatwave and the fact that I stayed up until three AM binging it, each episode ending in a “click next episode”-inducing cliffhanger.

Lower plays Rachel, a disgraced former reporter determined to find her nephew and uncover the conspiracy behind his disappearance. Driven by her reporter’s instinct, maternal love, and a need to regain her sense of morality and journalistic integrity, her performance is layered, her motivations unclear. Despite I Will Find You’s more commercial bent, her method-esque dedication to her craft carried over. “[For] Severance, it was really trying to tap into the subconscious of what was going on under the surface that I couldn’t even articulate. The visual medium was helpful for that. For Rachel, she’s very boots on the ground. I felt like she was really tactile. So I worked closely with the prop department to pack her bag. I wanted it to feel really practical and hands-on. I don’t even know if you ever even see what’s in her bag in the series; it was actually full of objects that she would use. The one that I thought was interesting to me was that she had a 35 mm camera that had actual film in it. That was something that felt anchoring to me. She had the actual physical recorder that journalists use and then a notebook that I was constantly literally writing notes in as Rachel was in that book, and so it would be with me at all times.”

But Severance was what turned Lower from a working actor with relative anonymity to, if not a household name (Lower was just described by Hello magazine as “remarkably private”) than at least “Helly R. from Severance.” The drama began its bingeworthy spin in February 2022, and follows a group of employees who’ve undergone a procedure to isolate their work selves (their “Innies”) from their home selves (their “Outies,”) theoretically allowing them to commit to each without the distraction of the other. With its satirical portrayal of corporate life, surveillance capitalism (made even more prescient by the rise of the Meta glasses), and, depending on how you interpret it, big pharma and big tech, the show struck a chord, becoming the most watched Apple TV+ show of all time. It was such a hot button cultural moment that it united viewers in a way that streaming, in all its on-demand isolation, usually struggles to. “I do recognize how rare it is for a show to hit the culture like Severance did. And for this show to be having such a wide appeal, it’s not lost on me that it’s extraordinary,” remarks Lower. Outside the Flaunt shoot, an emotional fan approached Lower to tell her that she and her boyfriend fell in love while watching the show. “I could tell it had had such an impact on her life. I’m still processing that that kind of encounter happens on the street.”

Lower portrays “Innie” Helly R., who’s unable to fathom why she’s been placed in a hostile working environment with no idea who she is, and “Outie” Helena, a powerful figure at the governing corporation. In the second season, Lower’s portrayal of Helena pretending to be her Helly R. was markedly convincing, winning her an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. “The fun of doing season one was that I was the one walking around being like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ and then season two, all of a sudden, I’m playing the strange thing that I was questioning in season one and that was honestly a more difficult process because her whole backstory is so alternative to how most people grow up. Getting to play that duality was very exciting.” The show’s hotly anticipated third season is rumored to drop in mid to late 2027, but Lower is contractually obligated to remain tight lipped. “I’m not allowed to say anything, but I will say that I am personally so hungry to get back on set. We are cooking up something.”

In an era where aesthetics often take precedence over talent and brand deals and a curated social media presence has become par-for-the-course of a creative career, Lower has not acquiesced. What other actor do you know who would spend her breaks between filming a hit show running off to join the circus, as Lower did, twice? “I think I’ve always had this sense that I would work as an artist in whatever capacity I was lucky enough to be afforded,” she says. “If you’re waking up every day and doing something that feels meaningful that hopefully has a positive impact on the world, to me that’s a spiritual practice.” The fame, for Lower, seems like a mere byproduct, one that she fittingly parses via none other than a theater metaphor.

 “It was Sam Worthington who helped me really reframe doing press…I think maybe someone told him this, and then he was passing it along, but this idea that when you go on and do stage work, afterwards you get to go and do a bow…And it’s a chance to basically say, ‘this would be really weird if you weren’t here. [If] we were just doing this alone to an empty theater. So thank you for coming.’ The bow is honoring the audience,” she says. ‘‘It would be really weird if we just made this for ourselves and watched it in our own living rooms.”

A week or so after our call, the heatwave showing no signs of abating, I remember her suggestion and walk unsteadily backwards, my sweaty soles searching for grip on my apartment floor. It’s 86°F in London and the world spins, the past giving way to the unknown future. Still, Lower’s looks bright: “I want to keep flexing different muscles...I feel like characters are almost tapping me on the shoulder when I read a script and they’re saying, ‘I want you to come check out what it’s like from my point of view.’ And then usually there’s a little bit of flutter in my chest of fear or excitement or ‘I want to see what it’s like to walk around in their shoes.’” In Lower’s case, that just might be backwards.

Photographed by Jeremy Choh

Styled by Anna Katsanis

Written by Juno Kelly

Hair: Kenna Kennor at The Visionaries Agency

Makeup: Lisa Aharon at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Mynxii White

Style Assistant: Aisling Finucane

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