Jessica Brown Findlay Breaks Down Her Mysterious Silo Character
“What is at the core? What won't disappear?”
Apple TV+’s Silo made a huge swing in its Season 2 finale by flashing back from its post-apocalyptic setting to show the “Before Times,” a less distant future where a journalist (Jessica Henwick) and a congressman (Ashley Zukerman) meet to discuss what could be a giant scandal. It was a complete departure for the show at the time, but in Season 3, it becomes an entire storyline.
Congressman Daniel Keene is now a series regular in Silo Season 3, but he’s introduced alongside his sister Charlotte, played by English actor Jessica Brown Findlay.
Findlay was already a fan of Silo when she got the role. “I started reading the scripts they gave me, and I was like, ‘No, wait, what's happening?’ So I needed to fill in that gap,” she tells Inverse. She requested Season 2’s scripts and read those first. “I knew what was coming in that last episode, and that blew my mind.”
Charlotte is a Navy pilot who develops a bad feeling about her next assignment — an instinct that turns out to be right on the money. “We meet Charlotte where she has a serious hunch that something is not OK. Something is awry,” Findlay says. “She doesn't know who is ordering that, but she just knows that something is about to go wrong. Don't think she could ever predict exactly what.”
Jessica Brown Findlay goes from Downton to D.C. in Silo Season 3.
In a heart-stopping scene, we see her and her fellow pilots fly into a strange cloud, only to be somehow affected. By the time Daniel finds her in the hospital, Charlotte has been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and has lost all memory of her family. “We discover Charlotte rediscovering herself,” Findlay says. “There is a sense of trust in her that we get to witness, and what happens when you allow certain people that part of yourself?”
Playing an amnesiac character is quite the challenge for an actor, especially since we only see Charlotte with her memory intact for a few scenes. According to Findlay, her process involved working backwards: establishing Charlotte as a person and then peeling back layer by layer. “I wanted to build her completely in my mind and then decide what is at the core? What won't disappear?”
Charlotte meets with her brother Daniel about a bad feeling she has about a future mission.
“It is quite a disconcerting feeling as an actor to go to work, having done all that work and then sit there almost keeping your mind blank,” she says. “It's a trusting process to know that you can strip all that work away and there will be something still because you're viewing the world brand new. It was just such a playful exercise.”
Memory is the main theme for Silo Season 3 across both timelines. Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) is now the mayor of her post-apocalyptic Silo, but after being engulfed in flames in the Season 2 finale, she’s found herself without the memories of what came before, like Season 2’s rebellion and her journey to a neighboring Silo.
Even though Charlotte has no ties to what’s happening in the Silo, Findlay did consider Juliette’s journey as she was portraying a similar story. “I wanted to get more understanding as to how Rebecca was portraying that sort of similar experience of not being able to remember who she was and what her life was,” Findlay says.
Charlotte’s memory loss in Silo Season 3 mirrors Juliette’s own amnesia centuries in the future.
We may know more about Juliette’s personality than Charlotte’s, but that’s what makes her character so interesting. We’re discovering her personality at the same time she is, and the result is a complex, tough, sweary sailor who, below everything, is fueled by empathy and kindness. “What deeply drew me to her and what I found so fascinating is her job demands her to do these things, but people choose their pathways, and she chose that path,” she says. “She chose to do some of the hardest things you can do. She has a huge sense of protection.”
That inner instinct to protect is at the very core of Charlotte’s character, and as she rebuilds herself, we’ll see that break through in multiple forms over the course of years — and, without spoiling anything, it may just factor into the establishment of the Silos themselves.
“She is someone who, time and time and time again — which we will see going forward and then into Season 4 — when there is danger, if someone is in danger, she will run towards the danger,” Findlay says.
