Tramell Tillman Is the Creepy Standout of Severance Season 2

A GOOD VILLAIN goes a long way. That’s no great revelation; with Robert Eggers’s new take on Nosferatu becoming a hit at the box office, Dracula—first created by writer Bram Stoker in 1897—is fresh on people’s minds, and that villain and his followers serve as a bit of century-old proof that a dangerous, menacing power can be a driving force in any story.

Apple TV+’s Severance, back for its much-anticipated second season after nearly three years away, is perhaps more in service to that than you might expect. What initially presents itself as a workplace dramedy/mystery (with a tone closer to Being John Malkovich than The Office) has proven over the course of its short run to be something much more sinister and insidious; our hero, Mark Stock (Adam Scott), is at the center of an almost certainly evil conspiracy at the hands of his employer, Lumen Industries, who are in actuality some kind of disturbing cult run for generations by the Eagan family. His boss, Ms. Cobel (Patricia Arquette), is deep in the cult and may even be running her own side agenda.

But part of what makes Dracula (or Nosferatu‘s Count Orlok) such an intimidating villain isn’t necessarily only what he’s capable of or what he’s planning to do, but rather how he can inspire others to blindly inflict his wrath on others. Dracula, in turn, has Renfield, his familiar; Renfield will be Dracula’s proxy, his tool and his weapon. And so Severance has its own Renfield—if the Eagan family, or Ms. Cobel, are our Draculas, then it’s Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) who has become our Renfield.

There are plenty of takes on the ‘loyal muscle’ archetype of villain who have become classics; think Richard Kiel’s steel-mouthed henchman, Jaws, in the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. But in Milchick, we get a new, hybrid, ‘of the times’ version of this character—a muscle-bound loyalist and a corporate stooge at the same time. Not only is Mr. Milchick someone who will carry out exactly the agenda that Lumen and/or the Eagan family and/or Ms. Cobel tell him to, but he’ll do it because he’s desperate to climb a corporate ladder.

What makes Milchick most terrifying, however, is the way he pairs his cold smile with a dead-eyed gaze. Tillman’s performance is one you need to be watching to understand the full depth of what he’s doing; he speaks in a warm tone, but you can see in his facial expressions that he’s almost always straining. He’s “nice” in the way that the boss at work who knows he needs to be “nice” is. But he also knows, clearly, that he’s got a job to do, and dealing with the employees on the severed floor is just one aspect of it (The rest? Well, we don’t quite know just yet.).

In season 1 of Severance, Milchick is pure middle management. He oversees Mark S., Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), Irv (John Turturro), and Helly R. (Britt Lower), but he’s taking strict orders from Ms. Cobel, who in stride gets her orders from the Lumen board. Milchick is never quite believable as the warm and understanding supervisor he wants to present as, but he gets particularly scary the few times he breaks character. After Dylan G. attacks him following a particularly frustrating moment during a Music Dance Experience (MDE), and when Irv calls him a “Smug mothafucka” for trying to keep him away from Burt’s (Christopher Walken) retirement party, we get to see just how easy it is for Milchick’s thin wall of kindness to come down. This isn’t the guy he’s presenting as—he’s something entirely else.

Yes, something. Mr. Milchick probably isn’t some kind of robot, clone, or otherwise… but he does act like it; think about him running down the hall, so utterly locked in to protect the company and stop anything that might threaten it.

Season 2, then, takes things to a whole new level. In the first two episodes of the season, we’ve seen the aftermath of the first season’s ending: Ms. Cobel is being kept away from the severed floor, and Milchick is now in charge. And he loves that. But in being in charge, we now get to see how he operates away from the office, interacting with the Outies; this is something we only got a taste of in season 1, when Mark’s Outie called Milchick to call in sick.

And, well, Milchick on the outside is just as creepy and unsettling as Milchick on the inside. Does this guy have any kind of life outside of work of his own? He seems so fully committed to carrying out the Lumen agenda that we may have to imagine he doesn’t; all we get to see is him jumping atop a motorcycle, with a cool leather jacket and helmet (the latter of which earns him a well-deserved compliment, to be fair).

In season 2, episode 2, titled “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig,” we see Milchick travel to meet with each of the Outies in the aftermath of the Overtime Contingency Protocol that allowed them to all switch places; his cold presence feels weird to us, having seen him in all these scenarios so far. But does it feel strange to the characters he’s talking to? Probably, yeah.

Recently, I’ve been drawing a very specific comparison when recommending Severance to people: it’s like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meeting Lost in the middle. And Milchick’s character—and the way Tillman so ominously plays him—draws me directly to a Lost character who always captivated my attention: Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus. Ben, too, was someone with unknown motivations and potentially differing identities. What is Milchick’s endgame? We were wondering the same thing about Ben Linus for years.

It certainly helps that Tillman is an actor clearly game for this expanded role; we knew he was a chilling and often uncanny presence to watch on screen, but seeing this play out in these different scenarios—with the Outies and the Innies, with Ms. Cobel, with Helly G.’s evil corporate Outie form Helena—is almost like a different performance with each passing scene. Except the truly uncanny fact is that while all of these different characters have different personalities in different settings (including Ms. Cobel’s bizarre false identity as Mrs. Selvig), Milchick seems to only ever be the same Milchick.

Is there something more to this, or is this just Severance‘s commentary on the driven corporate drones of the world, the people who will stop at absolutely nothing to get their next promotion? It bears thinking about, but even more it just makes us want to watch and see where Milchick (and Tillman’s performance) go next.

Interestingly, Severance is proving to be Tillman’s breakout role. While the 39-year-old actor has had some experience previously on television (he’s been a series regular on AMC’s Dietland and recurred on a few other shows, including The Godfather of Harlem, before), he only appeared in his first film, the Max original romcom Sweethearts, last year. His first time actually on big screens, though, will be a huge one: he’s set to appear in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning later this year. It seems like Tom Cruise was just as enamored with the mysteries of Mr. Milchick as the rest of us.

And sometimes, even Tom Cruise is waiting on the edge of his seat to see what happens next.

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