Dichen Lachman, the Severance star built on characters whose minds belong to someone else

Dichen Lachman

Photo: PhilipRomanoPhoto / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 22, 1982 Kathmandu, Nepal
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Raya and the Last Dragon, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Jurassic World Dominion

Look at the parts that made Dichen Lachman’s name and a pattern appears that would unsettle a less patient actor. In Dollhouse she was Sierra, a woman whose personality was wiped and rewritten for paying clients. In Altered Carbon she played Reileen Kawahara, an aristocrat who has lived for centuries by moving her mind from body to body. In Severance she spent a whole season as Ms. Casey, the soft-spoken wellness counsellor of Lumon’s severed floor, before the show revealed that the woman behind that blank smile was Gemma, the wife Mark Scout believed was dead. Lachman has built a career out of selves that belong to somebody else. The roles now arriving put her in charge of protecting somebody else’s story.

Her own life started across borders. Lachman was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, to an Australian father and a Tibetan mother, and moved with her family to Adelaide while she was still a child. She went through a string of South Australian schools, studied at the University of Adelaide and found her first paid work in advertising, including a commercial for the internet provider Wanadoo that aired in Britain.

Australian television gave her the training ground. In 2005, aged 23, she joined Neighbours, after auditioning for the part of Elle Robinson; the producers decided to create a new character for her, Katya Kinski. She played Katya until 2007, picked up small film parts such as Beth-Ann in Aquamarine, and then moved to Los Angeles to try her luck in American television.

The move paid off quickly. In March 2008 Joss Whedon cast her as Sierra in Dollhouse, his Fox series about “dolls” imprinted with new identities for each assignment. The premise demanded a different woman from her almost every week. Fox cancelled the series after two seasons. What followed was the working life of a genre actress on American TV: guest spots in NCIS: Los Angeles, Hawaii Five-0 and Torchwood: Miracle Day, a regular part in the American Being Human, and a lead role in Shawn Ryan’s submarine drama Last Resort, which ABC ended after 13 episodes.

Between jobs she made her own film. With her close friend Anton King, who wrote the script, she produced Lust for Love, a small independent romance funded through Kickstarter. The campaign asked for 70,000 dollars and closed in November 2011 with more than 101,000 from over 1,500 backers. Then came a run in Canada: Anya, a Grounder commander in The 100, and Jiaying in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the serene Inhuman leader revealed as Daisy Johnson’s mother who turned into the season’s antagonist. In 2018 Netflix released Altered Carbon, the adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s novel in which her Reileen, the hero’s sister, became the show’s coldest presence, and the same year she began a recurring role as Frankie in Animal Kingdom.

Severance changed the scale. When Apple TV+ premiered the series in 2022, Ms. Casey looked like a supporting part, a polite functionary reading compliments to employees in a room of soft lighting. The final episode of the first season turned the role inside out, and the second season, released in 2025, gave her “Chikhai Bardo”, the seventh episode, a long account of Gemma’s marriage to Mark, her grief and her captivity on Lumon’s testing floor. The title is taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the season finale Gemma finally escapes, while Mark’s office self chooses to stay behind.

The industry’s response exposed the oddity of her position. “Chikhai Bardo” earned Jessica Lee Gagné an Emmy nomination for directing, and Severance collected 27 nominations in 2025. Lachman, submitted in the supporting actress race, was not among the nominees, an omission that many viewers protested loudly online. The snub fits a longer pattern. Her strongest work tends to reach audiences in pieces: a series cancelled after two seasons, another after 13 episodes, a villain who changes bodies, a character split between an office persona and a captive. Even her film career runs on short appearances, from Soyona Santos, the dinosaur trafficker of Jurassic World Dominion, to Korina in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. She has rarely been handed a whole character to carry from first scene to last, and it is fair to ask whether Hollywood has noticed how much she does with the fragments.

The recent work suggests the answer is starting to change. She returned to Soyona as a voice in the animated Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, and in June 2026 Netflix released the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which she plays Yangchen, a past Avatar of the Air Nomads. In autumn 2026 she appears in the supporting cast of Other Mommy, Rob Savage’s horror film for Universal, starring Jessica Chastain and adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House; it opens in cinemas on 9 October.

The biggest project is the next one. In August 2026 Deadline reported that Lachman will play Impa, the bodyguard of Princess Zelda, in the live-action The Legend of Zelda, directed by Wes Ball, who had already cast her in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. The film’s worldwide release was moved forward to 30 April 2027. Severance, meanwhile, began shooting its third season in the summer of 2026. Apple has set no premiere date, and Lachman has admitted that, like Gemma, she has been kept in the dark about what comes next.

Away from sets, she keeps her family life mostly private. She married the American actor Maximilian Osinski in January 2015, and their daughter was born in May of that year.

For most of two decades Lachman has played women defined by what others took from them, starting with their memories. Yangchen and Impa belong to a different family of characters, the ones who watch over a hero and know more than they say. On 30 April 2027, when The Legend of Zelda reaches cinemas, audiences will see whether that shift gives her what her captives never had: a story told in one piece.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Severance, The Legend of Zelda, Dichen Lachman, Joss Whedon

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