‘That feeling of having a first crush’: How Zach Cherry and Merritt Wever made their ‘Severance’ marriage feel real
Zach Cherry and Merritt Wever hadn’t met before filming Severance Season 2, but they already had great respect for each other as actors. That’s helpful when you’re playing a married couple. “I was a fan of her work prior to this, and I don't even know if I've ever told her this, but I was definitely a little intimidated,” Cherry tells Gold Derby in a joint interview with Wever. “I was like, ‘Oh, I better bring it.’ But I was also excited because I knew that she would be able to take care of me in these scenes, and it was a great experience. We figured it out together.”
While Wever is a two-time Emmy winner with almost 30 years of film and TV experience, Cherry just broke through with his fan-favorite Severance performance as loudmouth MDR employee Dylan. Watching Season 1, Wever was definitely impressed by his work, and loved hearing that the show was planning to explore Dylan’s domestic life in Season 2.
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“I had binged the first season, and I remember thinking really highly of Zach as an actor,” Wever says. “I hadn't seen him before, and so it's one of those really lovely discoveries when you find someone's work for the first time. And I remember when I found out what they were planning for his character, I thought that it was something that, as a viewer, I'd be interested in. But then as an actor, I was like, ‘Oh, that's a wonderful thing to give him as a character to do.’ And then I met him and he was lovely and wonderful to work with.”
Over the course of Season 2, Wever’s character Gretchen interacts with both the “outie” and “innie” versions of Dylan. She’s used to the former, since she’s been married to him for years with multiple children, but Lumon’s new “family visitation” perk allows her to interact with her husband’s work persona for the first time. Wever commends Cherry for making the two Dylans actually feel like different characters.
Over the course of the season, Gretchen discovers that while the Dylan she knows is burdened by all the baggage of middle age and parenthood, Innie Dylan is seeing her with fresh eyes — and is falling in love with her for the first time all over again. Wever even developed an emotional relationship to Cherry’s two performances similar to Gretchen’s.
“I enjoyed the scenes with Innie Dylan so much that I kind of missed them. I preferred them to the Outie Dylan scenes,” Wever says. “The character is getting to experience these feelings she hasn't felt for so long, and she's getting to feel what it's like for her husband to look at her a certain way and maybe even love her again in the way that he used to. What I'm experiencing as both a character and as an actor is a lot lighter and more pleasant, almost like that feeling of having a first crush. So then when we went to shoot the outie scenes, it’s so much dimmer and bleaker.”
Wever continues, “Because we always shot the innie scenes first, episode to episode, I had a visceral [as opposed to just an intellectual] understanding of what it was that I had just gotten from Innie Dylan that I wasn't getting from Outie Dylan.”
Season 2 found the MDR employees reckoning with the differences between their innie and outie selves. But while Mark Scout (Adam Scott) and Mark S. couldn’t reconcile their differing desires, leading to that cliffhanger ending, the Dylan’s developed a better understanding. Gretchen made all the difference. Even when the two Dylans get a little competitive over her affection, it’s because they both love the same person.
“He's very vulnerable when he suggests that maybe they get married,” Cherry says of outie Dylan. “That’s kind of a big shock to him, but I also think that feeling allows him to understand his outie in the sense that, ‘Oh, this is how much I care about this person who I've only spent 95 minutes with.’ So then when he gets the letter from his outie and realizes there are things about him that his outie is maybe even jealous of, that allows him to appreciate his role in his outie’s life and that they're in this together.”
Dylan ends Season 2 on a good note, but that cliffhanger ending makes it hard to predict what the future will hold for him. No one yet knows what might happen in Season 3 of Severance, but Cherry likes it that way.
“When Season 1 ended, this storyline was not on my radar at all,” Cherry says. “We had not discussed this storyline, and then when we came back in for Season 2, they were like, ‘OK, here's what we think we're going to do.’ So I'm just excited to see whatever thing I can't even imagine now that they will tell me about once we start Season 3. I'm just looking forward to that.”