“I’m very much a beginner,” the actress Britt Lower said.
This was on a mid-December evening at a warehouse space in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Dressed in a T-shirt and houndstooth-patterned leggings, Lower climbed a ladder to a narrow platform where an instructor clipped her into a safety harness. Seconds later, Lower was upside-down, swinging from the ceiling of the España-Streb Trapeze Academy.
She dismounted, exhilarated. It was her fifth trapeze class.
Lower (rhymes with flower), 39, has been performing — professionally and at lower altitudes — for a decade and a half, with arcs on a spate of shows including HBO’s meditative stoner series “High Maintenance,” Hulu’s spiky dramedy “Casual” and FX’s surreal comedy “Man Seeking Woman.” She became more recognizable in 2022, as a star of “Severance,” the fantastical Apple TV+ show about co-workers who have volunteered to have a procedure that psychically separates their work lives from their home lives. Season 2 premieres on Jan. 17.
Lower, who has a low voice, wide eyes and a strong eyebrow game, begins the show as Helly R., a defiant new member of Lumon Industries’ Macrodata Refinement department. In her “outie” life, as the Season 1 finale reveals, she is also Helena Eagan, the daughter of Lumon’s chief executive. In both roles, she is dynamic, determined, dangerously self-possessed.
In his review for The New York Times, James Poniewozik praised the “nervy intensity” Lower brought to Helly R. Lower has some of that nerve offscreen, though she generally presents as looser, less insistent. Helly is the kind of woman you would follow into battle. Lower would hand you a balloon on your way.
“I’m a shy person who likes to try on being brave,” Lower said. “That’s why I like acting; it’s this emotional thrill.”
Lower likes to say that she grew up “20 minutes south of normal,” by which she does and doesn’t mean Normal, Ill. Her mother instilled in her the idea that art is for everyone. Playing dress-up and putting on shows were typical of her childhood. By the time she enrolled at Northwestern, she had decided to study acting. “It just ended up feeling like the scariest choice to make,” she said.
Terror also drove her into improv and then into trying to make a go of it as a New York actor. She auditioned on weekdays and spent the weekends as a face painter. Career acceleration was slow, and she insists that she liked that. “I’ve been able to work in relative obscurity, in a nice way,” she said.
Gradually she acquired a reputation as a comedian who could also act, which isn’t as common as it might seem. Jonathan Krisel, an executive producer of “Man Seeking Woman,” cast Lower before signing any of the series leads, impressed by her pluck.
“She’s down to clown,” Krisel said. “She’s willing to go to weird places and bring out performances that are unexpected and interesting and funny.”
The actor Ben Sinclair had known Lower for about a decade (they were, he said, gym buddies) when she was cast as his character’s love interest in the third season of “High Maintenance.” He was impressed by the degree of realism she brought to the role of Lee, the former wife of a disgraced celebrity. Acting opposite her didn’t feel like acting at all.
“I just think she’s pretty authentic,” Sinclair said. “In the characters she chooses, she is looking for the point at which there is an honesty.”
In 2019, not long after she shot “High Maintenance,” Lower wrote, directed and starred in a short film, “Circus Person,” about a woman who rediscovers a sense of adventure and surprise after a breakup. (Lower loves the circus in real life, she said, for the awe it inspires.) Just after she wrapped, her agents called. They had a script for her. It was a long shot, but she might as well try. So in her bathroom, she recorded Helly’s first scene.
Ben Stiller, who directed the pilot of “Severance” and five other episodes of the nine-episode first season, had no idea who Lower was. But he liked her sense of conviction. He had her come in for a callback, opposite Adam Scott. (Stiller hadn’t seen Lower as Scott’s wife in the short-lived sitcom “Ghosted,” mostly because no one has seen “Ghosted.”) In the room, the chemistry was immediate. Stiller had wanted someone strong-willed and energetic, someone who could make Helly an engine of the show. Lower had that.
“She’s really smart as an actress,” Stiller said. “She puts everything into what she’s doing.”
The first table read for “Severance” was days before the pandemic lockdown began. So for six or seven months, stuck in Los Angeles, waiting for filming to begin, Lower couldn’t do much. But the pause did give her plenty of time to get to know Helly. She made abstract paintings inspired by the character, in watercolor and crayon, and she curated playlists, heavy on the Patti Smith, that felt Helly appropriate.
When she finally moved back to New York (“Severance” films in the South Bronx and upstate), she was all-in on Helly’s frantic, total self-belief.
Lower shares some of that self-belief, but personally she is gentler, less assertive. “Helly leads with confrontation,” Scott said, adding, “Britt doesn’t. She’s always looking for the good in everything.”
When the show debuted, early in 2022, Lower was an immediate standout. “I couldn’t take my eyes off Lower, who is excellent in portraying her character’s increasingly desperate resistance,” Naomi Fry wrote in The New Yorker.
Another actress might have leveraged this semi-stardom. Instead, Lower gave away most of her belongings, stowed the rest in a trailer and drove off to join Circus Flora in St. Louis, singing and playing the ukulele. (In fairness, she also made a couple of indie movies: “Darkest Miriam,” which is scheduled for a limited release in April, and “The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer,” also scheduled for April.) At the end of production for Season 2, she did something similar, joining the Shoestring Circus in Washington State.
If she doesn’t exactly share Helly’s ambition, she has become more like the character and maybe vice versa. “In the same way that I play Helly, Helly plays me a little bit, too,” she said. She likes to think that Helly has made her more rebellious and that she has made Helly more self-aware.
That self-awareness is complicated in Season 2, which includes much more screen time for Helena, though Lower was remarkably reluctant to discuss any particulars. (At one point, asked to confirm a mild plot point, she looked over her shoulder and said, “I feel like there’s going to be a poison dart arrow that’s going to come out.”) The season’s theme, she said, elliptically, is, “Who am I in relationship to the people I love, and how do I show up for those people?” She did confirm that this season offers more goats.
Lower was more fearless — or at least very good at pretending fearlessness — when it was her turn on the trapeze again. She arced back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, then let go, flying free for a moment, in midair, before the instructor caught her by her outstretched arms.
“I like that edge,” she said once she had clambered off the mat. Her eyes were light, dancing. “I think, Well, if this is possible, then what else?”
