Britt Lower (Communication ’08) was fresh off of directing her short film “Circus Person” in September 2019 when her agents reached out with a pilot script.
They told her not to get her hopes up — it was a long shot, and everyone wanted in on the project. Still, they said they thought she was perfect for the role.
After reading the script, Lower couldn’t help but fall in love with the character Helly R.
She threw her hat in the ring, along with many other actors. Filming her audition self-tape gave her the chance to be Helly — an opportunity she said she treasured, even if it lasted for less than a day.
Since 2022, she’s portrayed that very role in Apple TV’s “Severance,” which broke viewership records for the platform.
“When I got the call that they were offering me the role, I literally fell to my knees in my living room,” Lower said. “I was in total disbelief.”
Helly R. quite literally starts the series. The pilot opens with Lower lying face-down on a conference room table from overhead, with her limbs sprawled in different directions.
The shot’s symmetrical framing — disrupted only by Helly’s body — sets the tone for the Emmy-award-winning series directed by Ben Stiller that imagines a workplace where employees’ consciousness is split between work and home.
Season two led to a surge in the show’s popularity. Viewership minutes increased by 218% from season one, according to Luminate Data, which tracks streaming analytics. Even two months after the season finale’s release, Lower said she’s still processing the whirlwind.
“There’s not a day that goes by when I show up to set that I don’t thank my lucky stars I get to be Helly R.,” she said.
The circus kickstarts Lower’s big act
When filming went on hiatus after season two of “Severance,” Lower traveled to Bellingham, Washington, to perform in the Shoestring Circus.
She said the same tent in the circus appeared in “Circus Person.”
“Sometimes, I like to think because I auditioned for Helly R. right after I had directed this film about the circus, I like to say that Helly R. was born at the circus,” Lower said.
While writing the short film, Lower became a member of the Circus Historical Society. She also said she learned that Bloomington-Normal, Illinois — just a few minutes from her hometown of Heyworth, Illinois — was formerly known as the “Trapeze Capital of the World.”
Her first go-round at the circus occurred after filming the first season of “Severance.” She said she spent the summer of 2022 at Circus Flora in St. Louis.
As a ringmaster, she said she usually guides the audience through shows consisting of many acts. Sometimes, she’ll even play the ukulele.
“There’s something about performing in a circle that feels deeply resonant to me,” Lower said.
Although she only began participating in circuses a few years ago, she first encountered them long before then.
When Lower was a teenager, she and her mother started a face-painting business. They toured summer festivals around central Illinois, where Lower met traveling performers. Even after starting at NU, she joined her mother when she returned home for break.
Following one particular weekend of painting faces, Lower said she’d earned enough money to buy a laptop for college.
“And I was like, ‘Wow, my creativity can help pay for my life,’” she said.
When the circus left town, Lower followed
Lower hasn’t put down her brush since.
During their years at NU, Nik Zaleski (Communication ’08) said Lower sometimes brought a box of face paints to group hangouts and picnics. The box especially came in handy around Halloween.
Zaleski said she met Lower on the steps of Norris University Center for sorority rush during their freshman year. Although neither of them joined a sorority, Zaleski still calls Lower a sister.
Their paths crossed a few weeks after that initial meeting to work on a Vertigo Productions play. They were also both members of WAVE Productions, another Student Theatre Coalition board along with Vertigo.
Although Lower served as WAVE’s technical director, Zaleski said her friend did far more, even designing sets and costumes.
“I remember her then as a person who was always turning things into art and turning the ordinary into the extraordinary,” Zaleski said.
Besides working on WAVE Productions, Lower joined the Griffin’s Tale Children’s Theatre Repertory Company. She said these experiences exposed her to people who dedicated their lives to the arts.
Prior to the company, she didn’t have a concrete idea of what such a lifestyle might look like.
“Having grown up in a small town, being an actor for your job was kind of as perplexing to me as the idea of going to outer space,” Lower said.
The opportunity that most shaped her professional life, though, came from an impulsive audition. During her freshman year, she made the long-form improv group The Titanic Players, joining a team of about 10 other students.
At first, she said she felt frightened. She didn’t think of herself as funny, and she wondered how she’d been cast.
But after she overcame that initial nervousness, she said improv became her “training ground.” Acting on screen requires working in groups, imagining scenarios and adapting to the unexpected — all skills Lower acquired from long-form improv.
Lower still performs with her improv group, Frat Boyz, about once a month. The group includes fellow “Severance” actor Zach Cherry, as well as several NU alumni.
“It’s always still frightening to me, like the day of the show, I get butterflies,” Lower said. “I have to really convince myself to go and step into the unknown. But every time I’m there, the moment we’re on stage together, we have the best time, and it feels like home.”
Lower’s improv background wasn’t a surprise to art theory and practice Prof. Michael Rakowitz, who taught Lower the first year he arrived at NU. He said she had an ability to “embrace messiness” in projects that lacked specific guidelines.
Even as her former professor, he said he admires Lower’s knack for working within any situation, no matter how unfamiliar.
“When the circus leaves town, the circus leaves town,” Rakowitz said. “You either go with it or you don’t. And Britt was always ready to go.”
Lower’s attitude allowed her to turn a major rejection into what she called “the best thing that didn’t happen to (her)” as well as the moment that solidified her decision to pursue acting professionally.
Every year, graduating seniors in the NU theatre department audition for the Senior Showcase, in which selected students perform for industry professionals in New York City.
Lower said her audition was the first of the day. Hours later, she found out she had not been selected for Showcase.
But even if NU wouldn’t send her to the Big Apple, she still wanted to go herself. Instead of backing away from acting, she doubled down.
After graduation, she moved to New York, where she joined a theatre company focused on new works, participated in all the student films she could find at New York University and met with anyone she could learn from over coffee.
“It was a great opportunity for me to become my own advocate after college,” Lower said. “I decided I do want to move to New York City, despite not having a connection to an agent, and what it inspired in me was a kind of hustle that I can look back at and really appreciate.”
Lower pitches her own tent
Lower landed her first television role on “Big Lake,” a 2010 Comedy Central sitcom that featured Saturday Night Live alums like Chris Parnell and Horatio Sanz.
Much like her reaction to making The Titanic Players, Lower said she thought the “Big Lake” casting directors had made a mistake when they offered her a role for Meg.
But to her friends, such an occurrence was no surprise. Zaleski said those who knew Lower always believed a breakout role was inevitable.
“She devotes every breath of her days to making art,” Zaleski said. “And that’s not to get famous, but it’s just because she’s one of these incessant makers, and she can’t help but be creating things constantly.”
Lower continued acting on screen for several years. Then came “Severance.”
The opening shot of Helly R. lying on the conference table captivated director Naomi Jaye, so much so that she wrote Lower a letter asking the actress to star in her upcoming project.
“She was just electric,” Jaye said. “And there was something really feral about her performance, and particularly her voice. There was such a real depth to her voice.”
Jaye wrote and directed the Canadian film “Darkest Miriam,” which was released March in select theaters. Lower plays the titular character, a librarian who grieves her father’s death while beginning a romantic relationship.
The first time the two met over Zoom, Jaye said Lower was outside her camper on her way from the circus.
After watching “Circus Person” and seeing the range of Lower’s artistic pursuits, Jaye knew Lower wore many hats. Still, on most film sets, people tend to stick to their assigned roles and rarely go beyond what’s expected of them, Jaye said.
So Jaye was surprised when, during one scene, she asked for a set piece to be repositioned — and it wasn’t a crew member who moved it. Lower beat them to it.
“It felt like she was all in,” Jaye said. “She was cast. She was crew. She was just doing all of it.”
Yet the action was second nature for Lower. She said she considers acting as just one role under the “umbrella” of being an artist.
For her, that umbrella also includes painter, writer, director and, of course, circus performer — but only for now.
“Having access to those different nouns has helped me to stay curious,” Lower said. “So my advice is to stay curious about all of your own nouns.”
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