For seven seasons, Gwendoline Christie played the stout-hearted Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, a woman who could go toe-to-toe with the male knights in a culture dominated by men. Brienne was shunned for her interests, but she did it better than pretty much anybody else and quickly won the hearts of fans. She also participated in some brutal fight scenes, most notably a season 4 clash with Sandor "the Hound" Clegane.
I couldn't help but think of that fight scene during the season 2 finale of Severance, where Christie's character Lorne — the woman in charge of the Mammalians Nurturable department, which tends a flock of goats deep in the bowels of the Lumon building — took on Mr. Drummond, the brutal Lumon enforcer who has been making Lorne sacrifice those goats for we know not how long. After Mr. Drummond started beating up Mark S, Lorne jumped him to help Mark and to make sure that no more innocent goats would die on her watch. The result was a bloody, knock-down, drag-out fight that would have made Brienne proud.
"This may be the first time that I've fought in a dress," Christie told Entertainment Weekly. "I had actually been reluctant to do any combat for years because I wanted to do other things. And because I played a part that was defined by that over the course of about a decade."
But when she landed the part of Lorne on Severance, she was open for anything. "When [director Ben Stiller] told me the ideas that brilliant [creator] Dan Erickson and everyone had for this scene, I just knew I had to go with it," Christie said. "And I knew that, actually, this was the most effective way to express Lorne's pain, that kind of inner screaming that we get a sense of in episode 3, we don't really understand, and nor should we, that that primal scream embodies itself as the desperate protective measure to take care of these goats, to protect these animals."
Gwendoline Christie's hopes for Lorne in Severance season 3
Again, Lorne's fierceness and protective instincts feel very Brienne-coded, which is a good thing. "I would absolutely love to return in the future," Christie said. "I truly would, because I have an intense fascination with this character, and I feel like I've only just seen the beginning of her. She causes me to explore parts of myself and my feelings and my psyche and my experience and my relationship to animals and my fellow man that I haven't looked at before. It is an endless source of fascination for me, and I think the show is truly exceptional. It's one of the most dazzling things on television in recent times, and it would be a tremendous honor and a phenomenal joy to go forward."
"So get your pens and paper out and write letters to Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller and Apple and anyone else important, and just say that you'd really like to see a bit more of Lorne."
Apple just announced that Severance has been renewed for a third season, so I don't think anybody needs to write letters. The second season ended with Lorne and the other "innies" — a person's second personality meant to exist only at work, produced through the severance procedure — still in the Lumon building, which is now under lockdown. I can definitely imagine Lorne knocking around down there with Mark and Helly and the goats next season.
Chrisie hopes we get to dig deeper into the character and possibly learn more about her outie, the person she is outside of work. "We've had some conversations about those kinds [of things]," she said. "I've vocalized some of my ideas around that, but it will be an intense joy to have that glorious honor and opportunity. I've got so many ideas, and I'm not even joking."
We would also, presumably, find out exact why Lumon breeds all those goats. We found a bit in the finale: the one goat, Emile, was going to be sacrificed so that it could help guide the soul of a woman Lumon was going to kill into the bosom of Kier, the company founder who the employees at Lumon worship as a messiah. Obviously, that is a cuckoo bananas reason to sacrifice a goat...or to do anything. Knowing Lumon, that really might be the extent of it, or there could be more mystery underneath.
"I do actually have the answers, but one of the conditions of doing the show from the creative team was they asked me something and I agreed to it, which was that I had to actually undergo the severance procedure," Christie said. "That means that I will never be able to release what the goats mean."
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