Britt Lower

The Daughter of the Face Painter

Britt Lower was born in Heyworth, Illinois, a town of barely three thousand residents. Her mother worked as a professional face painter at fairs and events, a circumstance that ended up shaping her visual approach to acting years later. In 2008 she finished her studies at Northwestern University and set off for New York with the goal of carving out a place in improv comedy.

She honed her craft at the Upright Citizens Brigade.

In 2011, she landed her first major role in the series Unforgettable, playing Tanya Sitkowsky for three seasons. It was a technical job that taught her the rhythms of commercial television. But conventional dramatic work wasn't her only goal. In 2015, she joined Man Seeking Woman, FXX's surreal comedy, where she played Liz for three years.

And the gamble paid off.

That series was a laboratory for the absurd that let her explore physical comedy and dry irony. During that period she balanced television with small roles in Casual or Future Man. In 2020 she took a step toward creating her own work and wrote, directed and starred in the short film Circus Person. It was a project shot with a magical realism aesthetic that used body paint as a vehicle to portray grief.

Confinement in the Lumon offices

After Severance premiered in 2022, her name began to take off in casting offices in Los Angeles. Playing Helly R. in the Apple TV+ production demanded complete physical restraint and a gaze capable of conveying despair without resorting to screaming. The directing of Ben Stiller trusted her to carry the emotional weight of the plot alongside Adam Scott.

She earned a Saturn Awards nomination in 2022 for this role.

In 2022, she also starred in the film The Drop, a dark comedy shot in Mexico that completely departed from the aesthetic coldness of her previous work. But Lower always returns to visual art when she isn't in front of a camera. On her social media and in small exhibitions, she shows works that blend the figurative with the abstract, a passion she maintains as a personal method of unwinding.

In 2024 she joined the cast of Dark Matter, the adaptation of Blake Crouch's novel. In this science fiction series she plays Daniela 2, a character who required filming highly dramatic scenes in Chicago locations under extreme weather conditions. The shoot for this production coincided with preparations to return to her best-known role.

The second season of Severance suffered considerable delays due to the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes. As a result, Lower didn't return to the filming set in New York until early 2024 to complete the new episodes. The production of this season had an estimated budget of $20 million per episode.