Severance's Dylan G. was a different guy before Zach Cherry auditioned

It’s hard to imagine Severance without Cherry’s idiosyncratic take on the character; indeed, he’s become something like the show’s avatar for Erickson. For example, Erickson previously said he had a nightmare before production started on the second season in which Cherry “called Erickson’s mom to say that her son didn’t know what he was doing,” the writer admitted to IndieWire. “Zach is the last person who [would] ever do that, but maybe that’s why my brain selected him,” Erickson theorized.  

His association of Cherry (or Dylan) with Severance goes beyond the subconscious. In the second season, Dylan interviews for a job at a door factory, but gets rejected because he’s severed. The scene is a nod to the job Erickson had when he first thought up Severance: “I was working at a company that makes and distributes doors and gates in the greater Los Angeles area—really, really was grateful to have a job, and it was a small business run by good people. But I had finished grad school, I had come here, I’d gotten the first Craigslist job I [found],” he explained in a different IndieWire interview. “It wasn’t what I wanted to do, and it was kind of mind-numbing work a lot of the time. The idea for the script came because I was walking into work one day and just found myself wishing that I could skip the next eight hours entirely, and I could just disassociate.”

On weaving this experience into the actual plot of the show, Erickson told Decider, “I timidly brought it up to Ben [Stiller, director/EP]. One day I was just like, ‘Hey, would it be dumb if Dylan went to a door factory?’ And he was like, ‘No, that’s great! Let’s do it!’ So yeah, I allowed myself that little Easter egg into my own life, because it’s also the history of the show. It’s where the show was conceived, basically. So I thought it would be fun.” All the more fun, of course, because it’s Zach Cherry’s singular performance bringing it to life.