[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Severance.”]
“Severance” Season 2 gave viewers a lot to work with in terms of broken love dynamics: There’s Mark (Adam Scott) trying to reunite with his severed and forsaken wife (Dichen Lachman), now a Lumon wellness counselor who holds the keys to the raison d’être behind the Macrodata Refinement number-crunching happening in a windowless office floor; then there’s Irving (John Turturro), now unsevered and reevaluating the relationship he had as an innie with Burt (Christopher Walken), who has also escaped Lumon’s clutches. But Merritt Wever as overnight EMT worker Gretchen, cheating on her husband Dylan (Zach Cherry) with his severed innie Dylan G. (also Cherry) to re-experience the thrill of their romance’s early days? Perhaps the most twisted of all.
Wever, the beloved two-time Emmy-winning actress who always brings a grounded naturalism to even the most heightened scenarios, joined the cast this season to make the push-pull of Dylan’s innie-and-outie life even messier.
“I didn’t ask a lot of questions about their history because when I got those scenes, I felt like everything I needed to know was in there,” Wever told IndieWire. “The writing gave me everything I needed to know, and there was so much uncertainty and so much richness to play in those scenes that I didn’t feel like I wanted to nail down every little detail. When Zach and I read it together, it felt like we were ready to just go and play, which I know is a corny word.” Wever comes in and out of five episodes of Season 2 as a put-upon wife who rarely gets time with her husband, who is mostly miserable in the outside world, but is probably the most fun-loving and joyous of the MDR Lumon bunch.
Gretchen gets the chance to meet up with her husband’s innie, and in him, she relives the spark she once felt for the outie Dylan, eventually kissing his innie before, well, severing their budding office-hours-only relationship. And when the outie Dylan gets a whiff, he’s mad as hell and ready to eject his innie Dylan G. from the Lumon project altogether.
“Much like how the character comes in and is only privvy to this specific aspect of the Lumon world, as an actor, I also would just come in and dip a toe in every once in a while and get the sense of this large picture, the large machinations and creative comings and goings that were happening,” Wever said of the New Jersey shoot on the series, created by showrunner Dan Erickson and also directed (across multiple episodes) and executive-produced by Ben Stiller.
“I felt very secluded and separated, and our stuff was isolated, but one of the results of the strike” — which halted production in 2023 — “I ended up getting to know the rest of the cast in a way that I don’t think would have happened if we had just shot the rest of the season, and I’d just finished my scenes and gone home,” Wever said. “I kind of got to meet people because of that hiatus despite of it.”
Dylan G. is mostly kept out of the madness of the Season 2 finale, in which Mark (both his innie and his outie) makes a play to rescue his wife from Lumon while also wrestling with his own innie existence and his attraction to Helly R. (Britt Lower). But Dylan G. is dragged into it as a marching band is summoned into Lumon’s quarters — it’s called Choreography and Mirth, per Lumon deputy manager Milchick (Tramell Tilman) — to celebrate the completion of MDR’s Cold Harbor assignment, and Helly R. goes into rage mode to overthrow the Lumon-operating Eagan family’s reign. On that day of shooting, there was also an earthquake, hardly noticed by the cast amid the chaos.
“They had been rehearsing that and maybe even shooting it a couple days before I showed up,” Cherry said. “The band was already plugged in and immersed. It was really long days but they were so pleasant to be around. But there was an earthquake in New York, but I did not notice it at all because the band was bopping around. Then, I started getting text messages from friends in New York and my wife, who was like, ‘There was an earthquake.’ And I was like, ‘Uh, there was?’ But then I couldn’t tell anyone why I didn’t notice it because I didn’t want to spoil the fact that there was a drum and horn section walking around MDR.”
In terms of shuffling between playing his innie and outie selves, Cherry wasn’t so methodical about the approach but instead understands the characters for who they are: ultimately separate people, but with a shared appearance. “The innie is kind of a version of this guy who likes himself, and the outie is a version of the guy who doesn’t like himself right now,” he said.
As for the kind of reverse chemistry Cherry and Wever had to build — his innie is, after all, aware his outie is married to this person, but they both have to approach each other with tentative unfamiliarity — Cherry said, “It was largely instinctive. We didn’t rehearse the scenes a ton or talk about them a ton. I think it helped me, at least, the order in which we shot [the scenes]. We started with the scene where the innie is meeting his wife for the first time. That, to me at least, felt like a first date, but where you know you’ve got a shot. My character knows this is his wife. He doesn’t know this person, but there’s this feeling that he should. As the season went on and we got to know each other better … then we shot the stuff later in the season and it felt like we knew what we were doing.”
“Ditto,” Wever added. Stiller directed her in both the first of her five episodes (“Who Is Alive?”) and the last (“Cold Harbor,” the finale). He’s known for being meticulous, and holding on a shot or a take until everyone finds it. “I’ve heard some of the actors say that since then, one of the good things about working with Ben is that he’s not going to move on unless he feels that he has it, and that they’ve learned to trust that,” Wever said. “One of the things of working on this show reminded me of is how nice it is to do multi-season work on television, because you get to build collaborative relationships with people.”
As for Season 3 hopes, Wever can’t share if he character will show up in the already-greenlit next installment of the Apple TV+ hit. But both actors know it will move faster than Season 2’s prolonged production, which was beset by the strikes, and that was after Season 1 was already stalled by COVID.
“Both of our seasons have been made under such unusual circumstances,” Cherry said. “Season 1 we were supposed to start shooting in March 2020. There was a table read I missed that first week of March … then, the world shut down. Then, this season we had the strike and extended because of that. Hopefully we will have a normal Season 3, knock on wood, fingers crossed.”
Still, though, for Wever and Cherry, it’s never comfortable watching themselves onscreen even when they are smaller pieces in a larger puzzle.
“It was easier for me to watch because I’m in it so sporadically,” Wever said. “There are whole episodes I can watch and enjoy without my central nervous system starting to go off the rails. I don’t think that I watched them as the episodes dropped week to week. I think I was sent a link at some point because I knew I was going to have to talk about it, and I wanted to see how they’d edited the story [while keeping it] away from a job I was filming at the time. I don’t find it useful to watch myself while I’m acting on another gig. It makes me a little self-conscious when I go to work.”
Cherry said, “I usually end up watching the stuff that I’m in, and sometimes I’m dreading it, or go ‘that’s pretty good’ or ‘ooh, I wish I could have that back.’ For ‘Severance,’ I do love to watch it as it airs. This season I mostly did that but similarly there was a point where we started doing deep-dives on specific episodes … but I prefer to watch it as it airs.”
