With the latest season of Severance coming to a close, The Globe and Mail spoke with Tillman about his professional journey, the layers of Milchick and the show’s deeper tensions
Tramell Tillman, who plays an uptight office manager in the series Severance, at the World Trade Center Oculus in Manhattan, New York City, on Jan. 8.his grin, loaded with paradoxical charm, hints at a joke only he knows the punchline to. It’s sharp yet rounded, bright yet unsettling, an optical illusion of warmth. On television, it’s become Tillman’s masterstroke. In real life, it scares him.
But I was told I wouldn’t make it as an actor, so I pursued medicine instead. The role models around me were doctors, lawyers and managers – success, as I understood it, meant following their path. Milchick holds power but operates within a system built, to be frank, on whiteness. It’s hard not to think about the increasing challenges of being a visible person of colour in corporate spaces, especially amid debates around DEI. What are your thoughts on this?
We don’t yet get the full intricacies of his experience, but what’s rewarding is when these hints are dropped in. We see him meeting with Natalie before his performance review to clarify the paintings. We see him quietly put them away. We see how he responds to Drummond in the moment when Drummond polices his speech, telling him to use smaller words. And then, in a beautiful moment, Milchick finally stands up for himself.
There are many Milchicks out there. Men, women and people beyond the binary who reduce themselves, put their culture aside, change their vocabulary and wrestle with their identity just to fit into the corporate structure around them. Just to get by. Just to do a job.
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