Britt Lower

Britt Lower is an American actor born on August 2, 1985, in Heyworth, Illinois. She studied at Northwestern University, where she earned a degree in communication, and later worked in Chicago’s comedy and improvisation scene before building a screen career. Her early television appearances included roles on Big Lake, A Gifted Man, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Good Wife. She also appeared in the 2015 Tina Fey–Amy Poehler comedy Sisters and in Noël Wells’s 2017 feature Mr. Roosevelt, playing Celeste alongside Wells, Nick Thune, and David Sullivan. Lower became especially recognizable on FXX’s Man Seeking Woman, the surreal romantic comedy adapted from Simon Rich’s book The Last Girlfriend on Earth. Across the series’ 2015–2017 run, she played Liz Greenberg, the former girlfriend of Josh Greenberg, played by Jay Baruchel. The show treats dating anxieties through deliberately fantastical events; Liz’s relationship with Josh and her later marriage to Lou, played by Eric André, are central to its early story. Her best-known role is Helly Riggs in Apple TV+’s Severance, created by Dan Erickson and directed in large part by Ben Stiller. The series began in 2022 and centers on Lumon Industries employees whose memories are surgically divided between work and personal life. Helly’s “innie” awakens on Lumon’s severed floor without knowing her identity and immediately resists the company’s system. In the first season, she attempts escape, sends messages to her outside self, and makes a violent attempt to leave work by suicide. The finale reveals that her “outie” is Helena Eagan, daughter of Lumon chief executive Jame Eagan, who has used the procedure as a public-relations demonstration. Lower’s performance as Helly requires her to portray both the trapped employee and the Eagan heir whose interests sharply conflict with the innie’s. For Severance’s first season, she and the ensemble received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. She returned for the show’s second season, which premiered in 2025, with Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman, and Christopher Walken. Outside acting, Lower has exhibited visual-art work and has used Instagram to share photographs, drawings, and short-form creative projects. Her public profile, however, is most closely associated with the sharply opposed selves of Helly R. and Helena Eagan: a conflict that gives Severance one of its clearest examinations of consent, corporate power, and personal identity inside Lumon.