Even ‘Severance’ Star Sarah Bock Doesn’t Totally Understand Miss Huang

This post contains spoilers for Severance’s second season.

Almost everyone at the Lumon corporation has questions about the mysterious recent hire, Miss Huang. The intimidating teenager played by Sarah Bock in the workplace thriller Severance is newly promoted floor manager Seth Milchick’s (Tramell Tillman) theremin-playing deputy. “Why are you a child?” she’s asked. “Because of when I was born,” she replies.

The enigmatic employee—who looks about 14, dresses like a Catholic schoolgirl, and sometimes sports pigtails, and whose previous job was as a crossing guard—helps supervise the contentious macrodata refiners (or MDR) Mark S (Adam Scott), Helly R (Britt Lower), Dylan G (Zach Cherry), and Irving B (John Turturro). She suddenly appeared in the labyrinthian office after Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) was fired for not preventing the “uprising” in which most of the work-focused “innies” got a glimpse at their “outie” personal lives, despite their severed status. “They’re not, like, forcing you to be here, are they?” Dylan worries. All viewers know is that the unusual staffer is the company’s “Wintertide Fellow.”

It turns out Bock is also in the shadowy. “I don’t really know the entire story of why she’s even there or her family history or anything about that,” she says of her character. “Most of it was just stuff I was kind of coming up with in my own imagination.”

That was partly due to circumstance. Severance season two’s fragmented production process, which was complicated by the 2023 Hollywood strikes, didn’t always afford her time to speak with executive producer Dan Erickson, and sometimes her questions didn’t have answers. But her approach to the role was also by design. “I felt that having that mystery as an actor was sometimes helpful in amplifying the mystery surrounding the character,” Bock tells Vanity Fair.

There are, however, a few details Bock feels able to share. She thinks the fellowship is a Lumon indoctrination tool, and that Miss Huang’s presence serves to further infantilize the innies. At the same time, “she is in some effect older than they are, and possesses more knowledge about certain things,” says Bock. Miss Huang may know, for instance, that outie Helena is posing as innie Helly to spy on the rebellious MDR. But Bock doesn’t think that her character knows about Miss Casey’s (Dichen Lachman) brutal detainment, the reason for Lumon’s goats, or what completion of the Cold Harbor file will mean.

Bock was 15 when she auditioned for the biggest role of her career—one that’s inspired a wild range of fan theories. She began acting in local North Carolina children’s theater at age five, and made her professional debut in a regional theater production of Annie at 12, in which she played the shy orphan Kate. Her childhood was filled with piano, guitar, dance, and tennis lessons. “I was lucky that I found what I loved doing so early,” she says. “I did bounce around lessons a bit though. I took piano until I was about 10, and then I realized that I didn’t like being told what to play and would rather just do it for fun. I remember at my last piano recital every other kid was playing Bach and Beethoven, and I played “Dancing Queen.” In middle school, she became the voice of Baby Shark, and in 2022, she was a day player on the indie film Bruiser. When her manager suggested she audition for Severance, her parents—Bock’s dad is a realtor and baseball card dealer, and her mother works in school library administration—were large fans. But she and her older sister hadn’t seen the show.

“We read a bunch of different young women,” executive producer Ben Stiller says via email. “Sarah had this calmness and felt very centered. She’s not afraid to hold a look or a moment…. Her eyes are so expressive, you can read a lot into them. I think she also trusts that an audience will come to her, as opposed to reaching out to them. It’s a thing that takes a lot of actors many years to develop.”