******Warning: spoilers for Season 2 of Severance******
As you must know by now, my vote for Best Show on Television is Severance —the workplace dark comedy that ponders what it would take for someone to sever their brain in order to avoid the pain or even discomfort of being alive. As I’ve written before, Severance is a brilliant metaphor for capitalism and slavery, and no character on the show has had a bigger breakout than our favorite handsome overseer, Seth Milchick.
Played with a delicious devilishness by Tramell Tillman, Milchick is a labyrinth of emotion in season 2 as the newly promoted manager of the Severance floor at Lumon Industries. The only Black man in Lumon leadership that we know of, Milchick plays the role of keeping the severed innies in line during the workday and wrangling their wayward outies at their respective homes, while riding the sickest motorcyle you’ve ever seen. But why is this handsome, stylish Black man there? What motivates him to play this role at a company that proves in season two that it is, in fact racist, and it is, in fact, doing slavery?
I caught up with my fellow HBCU grad and 1985-baby Tramell Tillman to talk all this Milchick and the Black Breaking Point we’ve all been through in corporate America.
Here’s a brief transcript of my SPOILER-FILLED interview with Tramell. *Paid subscribers, scroll down and watch the full video interview below the fold.*
BLACK GIRL WATCHING: This was such an amazing season. You did such beautiful work on season two. I did not think they could top season one, but y’all came back with season two like, ‘You have not seen anything.’ So I, as a Kier devotee, I am super just thrilled with how this season turned out and.
TRAMELL TILLMAN: Thank you.
BLACK GIRL WATCHING: There’s no worries about spoilers, so we’re gonna go all into [season 2] and all of your beautiful work. But first, I wanted to talk to you about when I met you last month. I was at your Rising Star Award event and you just gave such a beautiful speech. You specifically asked for family to challenge you to get you back on the right path if you’re not there. And that just felt like it spoke so much to your character and who you are. And I would just love to hear why you chose an award acceptance speech to take the time to be like, ‘We’re in this together and I want to be accountable to you.’
TT: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. For me, the theme, you know, to dream forward, you know, I really meant when I said that that’s that’s a scary thing to do [with] where we are right now. And I’m a person who is a dreamer. And it feels as though there’s so much cost to activate your dream or move on the dream or have a conviction towards something because we’re in such a polarized world right now. And anything that’s said or done, you are canceled or pushed out and your whole lifestyle has changed and whatnot. So what it was for me was just speaking from pure honesty.
I do dream and I do dream big. And I want us all to have opportunities to grow and learn and share our art and create with one another. But there’s a lot of resistance to that. We’re still fighting with each other. We’re still wrestling with one another. And it’s disheartening to see. And so I do my best to be part of the solution to make myself available to other Black creatives, other queer creatives to advocate as much as I can in the ways that I can because I do understand the importance of community. And while I have been very fortunate to travel the world doing what I love to do and work with all of these wonderful, talented legends, you know, I also understand and know for a fact that there’s not many people that look like us that are in these rooms. That should change.
And so, if it does mean advocating for a Black hairstylist to come on board because she has the knowledge and the expertise to take care of my hair, then I am going to advocate for that. If it does mean having more PAs of color on set, so they can have the opportunities to learn how a set works and operates and understanding financial management on set and producing and so forth and so on, then I’ll be a part of that as well.
BGW: I love that. Speaking of being the only one set, we have Milchick, Seth Milchick, the only Black man in at least upper management that we’ve seen. And I remember you saying, I think several times now, you’ve said that your first question to Ben Stiller [the director and executive producer] and Dan Erickson, the creator of the show, was, ‘Is Milchick Black? Does he know he’s Black?’ But I never heard the answer. What answer did they give? What was the conversation that you all ended up having to create how Milchick’s Blackness shows up in the world?
TT: I laughed because there was no answer.
BGW: Ooh!
TT: You know, it basically evolved into something that is still very much alive now. It’s a continual conversation. You know, and I wondered if they knew what I meant by that question. Cause I’ve been in a few conversations with friends and whatnot and we’re talking about dating and such like that. And they say, ‘Well this person’s Black.’ And then we jokingly say, ‘Well, do they know they Black?’ And it creates this whole different world because there’s that connection to culture, a connection to who you are as a person, the realization that you are in a world that does not look like you. And so you will very well be treated differently. So the depth of the question also was connected to whether or not we’re approaching race in season one, you know. ‘Cause that was very important to me.
And the reason why I asked that question is because I had learned that Ben [Stiller] specifically wanted Milchick to be Black. And there was nothing in the show that spoke to his Blackness. So I was thinking, well, why do you want him in Black? What is that? You know, so that’s why we continue to have these conversations around Blackness. And when we were exploring season two, Dan Erickson had approached me and said, ‘What do you think about Milchick having these paintings from Keir that are basically blackface?’ And I asked him, I said, ‘Well, how does he respond to this?’ Because that’s going to be indicative of where his journey goes. And it’s also going to tell us how our Black audiences are going to respond or disconnect or connect with this character. And so that led to even more dialogue.
Working with Sydney Cole Alexander, who plays Natalie, and when she presented me with the Kier paintings, Ben pretty much was like hands off. He said, y’all do what y’all wanna do. And I asked for rehearsal space and we got the time to get together and Natalie and I chatted and bonded and everything. And so, when it was time to film, there was direction that Ben would give us, but for the most part, it was us, me and her feeling the scene out. And she would throw me something, I was like, ‘I see you, let me throw that back. Okay, we doing this.’ So it was really, very collaborative, as it should be when it comes to dealing with Black characters or characters as a whole that are not often displayed in such a specific way as we see with Severance.
BGW: So I love that you and Sydney have that relationship because Milchick and Natalie obviously do not, you know, he is reaching out to her for anything— like, ‘Connect with me, please.’ Like, ‘Let me see—let me know that I’m not in this by myself.’ And she’s like, ‘Not me! I’m not the one! Don’t don’t try that.’ So I am interested in like what what was going through Milchick’s head when he’s seeing these paintings. So, he’s obviously not OK with it. He’s obviously disturbed with it enough to put it away in the back of his closet and never see it again. So what’s his rationale for you as you’re as you’re, you know, bringing this to life? What’s what’s Milchick’s rationale for why he’s upset by these paintings?
TT: Well, my interpretation is that he is very surprised by this. It is a performative effort in corporate inclusion that is absolutely ridiculous, right? And as a person who has worked in the corporate world, I’ve been in that space. I know exactly what that feels like. And to send another Black employee that happens to be fair skinned to give you these paintings as the Board is watching is extremely off-putting. And just stepping away from Milchick’s, you know, response to it, but more so just the show at large, it speaks to, you know, the colorism aspect.
There’s a little bit of—and I hate to distill it to this point—but this is what it reminds me of: it’s kind of like the field Negroes versus the house Negroes, because she is closer to whiteness and she is closer to the Board. And so, now she is coming down from the Board to go down to the field to send this guy this gift from the board—I know, that kind of feeling as well. And the Board is watching. They won’t show themselves, but they are making their presence known. And so his job is to receive this with grace. And that is also part of his performance review. So not only is he unable to enjoy it authentically, because he is going to be evaluated on how he’s done, but he can’t connect with the only other person of color that’s in a high position that we see in the world of Lumon.
And one thing that I appreciate in episode [five] is that there was conversation of taking that scene out where Milchick and Natalie connect before he goes into the performance review. Before he goes into performance review, they’re standing outside the hallway. They were gonna remove that scene. They were gonna remove it. And I said, no, you need to keep that. It’s really important to keep that because we need to see how this man is still wrestling with what he just experienced. And it wasn’t enough for him to take this iconography and just push it away and then it’s done. That’s not how it works. That’s also not reflective of human behavior.
If someone does something that is jarring, you’re trying to do everything you can to make peace with it. And so we needed that scene. We needed Natalie. We needed to see her make a decision if she was going to give something to him or not at all, or basically insinuate that it’s, “Not right now,” because [Lumon boss] Drummond is waiting.
BGW: is that what she was communicating? Like maybe at a later date, but not now?
TT: That is up for interpretation.
Paid subscribers can watch the full 32 minute video interview with Tramell Tillman on Severance and the Black Breaking Point below:
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