How Severance’s Zach Cherry Had a Love Triangle With Himself

Spoilers ahead for Severance season two episode nine, “The After Hours.”

Even before the season-two heartbreak and yearning, Dylan G., the Innie who most acts like an actual colleague, was probably the most relatable character on Severance. He’s a lover, an ally, a shoot-the-shitter, an F-bomber, and, being the most perk-motivated one at Lumon, he’s probably television’s foremost sweet little treat guy. If there’s an image that stayed burned into Severance fans’ retinas in the long cold hiatus between seasons, it was probably Dylan’s hero moment holding the Overtime Contingency Protocol switches like he was Innie Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Dylan is the human face that keeps Severance grounded as it delves further into puzzle-box territory, and that’s due to the special sauce that Zach Cherry brings to the character. By episode nine in season two, however, Dylan G. is a broken man, lovelorn for his own Outie’s wife, played by Merritt Wever. “It really felt like the preteen years, when everything feels like the most dramatic version of something you could imagine, because it’s the first time you felt it before,” he says.

What was your vision for Dylan’s Outie in season one? As an actor, what was in your head?
In season one, I sort of intentionally didn’t want to know what his Outie was like. I wanted to live in Innie perspective as long as I could. In season one, he had all of these theories of what his Outie might be like, and they’re mostly boasting, and ego-boosting. It’s that self-mythologizing that he does. I didn’t have a specific vision. I knew it would probably be a disappointment to someone who’s imagining himself as a swashbuckling riverboat captain, or whatever he imagines in season one. But as they started to tell me about what the plan was for this season, it made a lot of sense.

How did you go about developing Outie Dylan?
Once we started to talk about the arc for the season, and what we would learn about him — specifically this sense that he never really found his thing on the outside, and maybe he had trouble keeping a job, or finding the thing that he is really passionate about — it was easy for me to conceive of them as a Sliding Doors kind of thing. The Innie is the version of him that did find his thing, so he has all this confidence and he doesn’t have any of the additional baggage of the world. Then as the Innie starts to learn more about his family, he starts to see that the Outie is a version of him that didn’t find his thing but also did get the opportunity to make these connections and have this level of intimacy that the Innie has nowhere near touched.

Do you feel there’s more cohesion between Dylan’s Innie and Outie than some of the other characters?
It’s something we all think and talk about a lot: What carries over? Some of it has to do with how dramatic the difference is between the Outie and Innie’s life experiences. Outie Dylan wasn’t groomed to be the CEO of this mysterious company his whole life. He has baggage that feels a little more like something I can personally relate to. He has a family, he needs money, he’s struggling. Innie Dylan kind of feels like a younger version of the Outie. That’s one way I thought of it.

So pre-family Dylan is cool, funny office guy, and starting a family is the thing that makes a guy depressed.
But he’s also more annoying and abrasive. Innie Dylan reminds me a bit of my younger self. I thought about myself way more than I thought about the people around me.

Outie Dylan gets a very funny scene in his job interview at the door factory. Were you drawing on past awkward auditions or job interviews when you filmed that?
I definitely am a terrible job interviewer. I always hated doing them, and they always feel absurd. Not to that level, but I always wished I could say in a job interview, “Can you just trust me? I know I’ll be good at this. Why do we have to do this weird song and dance?” That scene is such a heightened version of that — it’s going well for a second, then he says one wrong thing and the whole thing blows up. I was drawing from that feeling.

Besides playing Outie Dylan, even Innie Dylan goes through a lot of character growth, particularly after Irv’s departure. What was it like to play this darker version of him?
In some ways, Innie and Outie Dylan start to move a little bit closer together over the course of this season. Outie Dylan starts to be woken up to the ways in which he’s been sleepwalking through his relationship, and Innie Dylan starts to feel some of that same pressure and pain from the outside world that he hasn’t experienced before. What’s interesting about the Innie Dylan arc this season was that he’s having all of these big emotions that he hasn’t experienced before, so it really felt like the preteen years, when everything feels like the most dramatic version of something you could imagine, because it’s the first time you felt it before. He’s experiencing the loss of a friend for the first time; he’s experiencing heartbreak for the first time. It was interesting to play with that but as a guy who’s not a teenager.

He loses Irv, and you also lost John Turturro as one of your primary scene partners. Did you feel that loss?
It was a legitimate bummer not to have John around as much. He’s such a great presence as a scene partner and on set. He’s a lot of fun. I don’t know if he took me under his wing, but I climbed under his wing a little bit. Season one was all four of us together — him, Britt, Adam, and me — and it was this really fun vibe whenever the four of us were there. This season, we get way less of that, but it luckily mirrored the experience of the character, because he’s lost his friend. John is still around, and I’d still see him while we were shooting other things, but it was a bummer not to have as much stuff to do with our group.

Can you tell me about filming the funeral scene? Was it creepy to eat Turturro’s head in melon form?
Yeah, it was. It was also helpful, like all of the elements of the show, for me as an actor: the way the sets feel so real. The fact that we had an actual physical melon-head of John Turturro there to be my scene partner in that moment, it really does bring a whole additional element of support to the performance and makes everything feel so much more real. I will say, though, I think the melon I was eating was from a separate melon. I wasn’t actually eating his head.

This season, Innie Dylan falls for his Outie’s wife, Gretchen. This episode, it all comes to a head. What was it like to be in a love triangle with yourself?
When they told me that, it felt like, Okay, this is such a particular story that our show can tell: It is this guy in a love triangle with himself and his wife! It made the Innie scenes especially interesting, because it was this weird combination of first-date energy, but also you know that this person is married to you, so there’s this level of comfort that is underneath the nervousness. It was really fun to figure that out with Merritt and play those scenes. It felt like this first-love arc. Then, of course, he finds out it’s not going to be the thing he thought it was. That’s so common for first-love experiences. You develop this fantasy of what might happen, and you don’t often end up being with that person forever. And he has that cruel realization and experience, although it’s not exactly that, and that’s very unique for our show

Can you talk about filming their kiss?
It was a little intimidating for me as a performer for a bunch of reasons. I mostly came up through sketch and improv comedy, so I haven’t necessarily been asked to tell this type of story before in my career. It was exciting that they had faith in me. Feeling that level of trust from Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson and everyone else allowed me to believe that I could do it. It was both exciting and intimidating to learn that Merritt was going to be playing my wife. She’s such an incredible actor that I definitely had to do a little bit of, Okay, buddy, don’t blow this! But she’s so wonderful, and made me feel so comfortable the second I met her, that once we started working on it, a lot of those jitters went away.

This is your first time doing a romantic plot?
I’ve done all kinds of things in my high-school and college-theater life, but in terms of an on-camera career, this is definitely the first story of this type that I’ve done.

In episode nine, you have this devastating, vulnerable scene where you propose to Gretchen with a little paper ring. What did you make of that moment?
It’s a reminder of the lack of life experience the Innies have. Of course there’s no world in which this woman could come live with her kids underground in an office, but he is so smitten and so naïve that, to him, it felt like a possibility.

You mentioned your improv and sketch background. How have you brought that experience to playing the office cut-up, and what’s it like working with Britt Lower, who you also do improv with?
When I moved to New York, I started doing improv all around and taking classes at UCB. I think I had been performing at UCB for ten years by the time this show came around, and Britt was also in that New York improv world. Britt and I actually didn’t know each other when she first lived in New York, but once we started shooting season one, we realized we had so many friends in common from that improv world. Now we’re on a team together, and we do perform occasionally. One way that it helps Britt and me on Severance is we have this shared language and approach to creativity that is a real shortcut for familiarity and comfort. So we clicked right away. In season one, when we were trying to build that office camaraderie, it helped a lot.

In terms of my approach individually as a performer, I do try to approach things with an improviser’s eye — being in the moment, reacting to what my scene partners are doing, and trying to make the lines feel lived-in. Ben has been very encouraging of me to improvise when we’re shooting. Sometimes it makes it in, often it does not, but it helps me figure out the boundaries of the character, figuring out what feels like Dylan and what doesn’t.

I know you’re a gamer, and a lot of Severance fans have made a game of trying to codebreak the show, theorizing, puzzle-solving. Do you do any of that?
I really don’t. I sit back and go, Hey, they’ll tell me what I need to know when I need to know it. 

Have you seen all the memes about Dylan’s glasses slipping on his face?
I don’t think I’ve seen those memes. I dip in and out of that stuff.

People are concerned.
That’s very understandable. The glasses are almost their own character.

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