“That’s the great thing about being an adult,” says Sydney Cole Alexander, who plays Natalie, the liaison with a wide smile and a cold gaze on the hit workplace thriller.
As Natalie, a devoted spokeswoman for the shadowy Lumon Industries on “Severance,” Sydney Cole Alexander has an exacting morning routine. It starts with that tightly coiled updo.
Ben Stiller, one of the Apple TV+ drama’s executive producers, “has a reputation for being very particular about hair,” Alexander said. After she was cast in the series, which follows workers who sign up for a procedure that bifurcates their personal and professional lives, she sat for a camera test. Stiller had asked her to repurpose the freeze-dried smile she flashed in a Crest commercial she’d booked the same day as “Severance,” and she encouraged him to let Natalie, the headset-wearing “conduit to the gods,” as she puts it, go blonder.
“Every curl on my head was curled,” Alexander recalled. “And I just thought it was so Lumon, because that would take forever. I think it helped me to think about: What is this woman’s morning like? How committed is she to perfection and this company, and representing them perfectly?”
In Season 2, which had its finale on Friday, the facade slips momentarily in a charged, nearly wordless exchange when Natalie presents Seth Milchick, a Black department chief and fellow Lumon true believer, with “inclusive” paintings from a tone-deaf board. “I did feel a little bit of sympathy with Milchick, which I think is terrifying for her,” said Alexander, who is biracial. “Because this is her prize, that she’s not sympathetic; it’s why she’s so good at her job.”
In a video interview this month from her Brooklyn apartment, Alexander opened up about another dream role, the Jim Carrey movie that gets her choked up, her incurable sweet tooth and more. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Vintage Shopping
As a teenager in New York City, a social activity was going to Beacon’s Closet or No Relation. I started furnishing my apartment with vintage things. There’s something so fun about the story of an item and that something can last, not even decades, but centuries.
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Source: Television - nytimes.com
