At the upcoming 2026 Critics Choice Awards, the critically acclaimed Apple TV series Severance is nominated for four awards. For the second season, it has received a nomination for Best Drama Series and three acting nominations for Adam Scott, Tramell Tillman, and Britt Lower. The second saw Britt Lower come into her own within the dual character of Helena and Helly. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lower and discussing playing the duality of the role.
Severance Season 2 dug deeper into the mysteries of Lumon Industries. It focused on Mark Scout’s attempt to save his wife, leading to a tense, action-filled season where the inner and outer parts of Mark clash over her fate. Throughout this, the Lumon’s “Cold Harbor” project and lore are revealed while Milichick faces repercussions, Helly grapples with her CEO father, and Irving continues to uncover more of the truth.
Severance’s Britt Lower Talks About Playing the Duality of Helena/Helly in Season 2
Ricky Valero: I’ve seen you speak about playing the duality of Helena and Helly and weaving in and out of the character. How has this role helped you become a better actress?
Britt Lower: Oh, wow. That’s a great question. Part of my job as an actor is to sculpt the inner life of a character. And that work is very nuanced and sort of subtle. I don’t even know if I could describe it. It’s like drawing pictures and listening to music, and just like walking through nature and sort of thinking, using your imagination.
But I would say that carving and sculpting the two inner lives of these specific parts of the same person was just a wonderful challenge because they share some similar values. They’re both extremely loyal, both driven, and both highly intelligent. But they diverge because of their different experiences. Like Helena has lived a whole life where she’s had to put on many masks, and Helly, like, never even heard of a mask. You know, there’s just no filter.
So getting to play both sides of the same person, which is like, it’s almost like the inner child and the inner critic in the same person, and getting to explore those. To your question of what’s helped me as an actor, it’s that we all have that every character that I ever get to play will have those two sides of themselves in some way, shape, or form. And so I think I’ll always think of it through that lens moving forward.
RV: How difficult was it to be Helena pretending to be Helly? Does it ever get confusing keeping the personalities distinct?
Lower: It was a dance of figuring out, along with Ben and then also with the other actors, how they had an effect. Basically Helena’s job is to blend in and try to be Helly, which is an actor’s job. Therefore, there was a similar recursive quality to that, right? A Russian doll effect. It was a wonderful dance that I was so grateful to be gifted.
RV: What was it like to film Woe’s Hollow (Episode 4)? It’s such an epic scope and location, and such a key moment for the series. How did it compare to some of the other episodes you’ve done?
Lower: Yeah, it was really different. Namely because of the sun. We were getting to work with natural light. And with natural light, you get so much inspiration from the elements of nature, but you also have a time constraint because the sun goes down at some point. We worked really differently on that shoot, and we were in Minnewaska State Park for a month and a half, I think it was.
And the hair and makeup team would do our hair and makeup in the morning, and then we would actually go up into the mountains with a skeleton crew. So we wouldn’t have touch-ups throughout the day because there wasn’t time for it. So we just moved a lot more swiftly as a team with our camera team and with our whole crew. It added an urgency, I think, to that episode that was, like, really effective.
The Critics Choice Awards will air on E! and USA Network on Sunday, January 4, 2026. Severance Season 1 and 2 are streaming on Apple TV.
Family, Faith, Film and Football.
