‘Severance’ Star Tramell Tillman Teases Higher Stakes Following Season 1 Cliffhanger (Exclusive)

The groundbreaking Apple TV+ series Severance dropped its freshman finale Friday morning, much to the shock and dismay of audiences left stunned over a legit edge-of-your-seat conclusion. Following a very nail-biting event that sends “Severed” employee Mark S. (Adam Scott) into a frantic spiral, Severance star Tramell Tillman — who plays Mr. Milchick, the floor manager on the severed floor of Lumon Industries — tells PopCulture.com that after the Season 1 finale filled with “brain explosions,” there’s a lot more to come when the show returns for its sophomore offering on Apple TV+. 

[Major spoilers are ahead for Severance: Season 1, Episode 9, “The We We Are”] By the season finale, audiences get a deeper dive into the psyche of the characters, something Tillman admits will only spark more questions and elevate the situation they have each found themselves in. “As you see the stakes for each character, they just continue to rise in Season 1. There’s more skin in the game,” he said, adding how, through the example of “Severed” character Dylan (Zach Cherry), we learn there is more than meets the eye among the revelations that let slip the Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement Department employee has a family. “We see where Helly’s place is in Lumen. We understand about Mark’s character and the twists that happened there.”

With the show getting picked up for Season 2 just earlier this week, Tillman admits he can’t speak much about the next set of episodes but believes firmly the “stakes are just going to continue to rise” as the series from director Ben Stiller continues. “It’s going to be this great boiling pot… I’m really interested in seeing what develops and what happens.”

Sharing how his character Milchick “knows everything” about Lumon Industries and is a role that has kept him on his toes, Tillman states from what more he can gather about the mysterious manager, is one that is an “all-knowing, gate-keeping, bones collector, secret-holding” kind of person. “It’s imperative for me to be prepared as an actor so that I can assign information in my head about what I know about these people,” he said, adding how he binged all nine episodes before they premiered. “When I read Episode 9 [“The We We Are”], for the first time, I was on my laptop and I was scrolling and I said, ‘You’re not going to end the season this way! You cannot end the season that way!’ And then I realized there were no more pages and I was screaming and then when I watched it in real-time, I was just gobsmacked. I was yelling and screaming and jumping up and down. It’s a huge cliffhanger.”

Stealing the show in many ways as the perplexing antagonist Mr. Milchick, Tillman says he understands why viewers label him a villain even though he admits in the craft, they “always” tell you not to judge your character. “Everything they do is justified. There’s a reason behind it, and I think it’s an easy shot to label Milchick as a villain. But more so than that, this is a guy that is committed to doing his job and doing his job well,” he said. “His tactics are questionable, yes. But he’s effective and he’s efficient and everything he does is connected to manipulation in a way and he’s very skilled in that. How he’s able to be warm and gentle, but then the switch of a dime, he’ll scare the hell out of you.”

Severance stars Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, Jen Tullock, Dichen Lachman, Michael Chernus, John Turturo, Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette. All of Severance Season 1 is now available to stream on Apple TV+.