Zach Cherry on ‘Severance’ and His First Emmy Nomination

Zach Cherry has put in his time at the office. Before he earned his first Emmy nomination playing a diligent employee of the enigmatic Lumon Industries on the Apple TV+ thriller “Severance,” he worked for many years as an office manager at a nonprofit organization in Manhattan.

It was a job that Cherry appreciated for allowing him the flexibility to pursue opportunities in improv comedy and acting, and for its relatively relaxed atmosphere, though he did get reprimanded once for wearing shorts to the office. He explained that it was not his employers, specifically, who were mad at him.

“My company didn’t care,” Cherry said. “But we were subletting space from a larger company and it went through the grapevine to my boss that I wore shorts one day. I was told you actually can’t. So I found the limits of business casual.”

Cherry, 37, had a pleasantly laid back demeanor as he sat in the basement food court of the City Point mall in Downtown Brooklyn one recent August morning. His beard was bushy and he was dressed in comfortable, loosefitting clothes he acknowledged were “within a few standard deviations” of what he’d normally be wearing if he weren’t about to be photographed.

Through a combination of talent and diligence, Cherry has accumulated a roster of quirky, standout characters on shows like “Severance,” “Succession” and “You” as well as in films like “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

And since his formative years he has been dedicating himself to improv comedy, a calling that he’d pursue whether it paid him or not — and which will never let him celebrate his achievements without interjecting a note of self-deprecation.

From the moment he was free to follow his own path, Cherry said, “I was never going to stop doing some version of comedy and performing. It was more about, can I do it as my gig?”

“There are still questions about that,” he added with a laugh. “It’s like, you never know.”

Cherry, who grew up in Trenton, N.J., started performing improv comedy at a middle-school summer camp, studied improv in high school and was part of an improv team as a student at Amherst College.

After graduating, he performed frequently at the various Manhattan locations of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater while continuing to work his daytime office job and try out for various acting roles.

As Cherry explained, “Different opportunities came from different trees. But I was planting a lot of fruit.” He chuckled at his own wordplay: “Yeah, good metaphor. Perfect. Makes sense.”

Some of those early breaks included the HBO comedy “Crashing,” where Cherry played the inept manager of the lead character played by Pete Holmes.

Judd Apatow, an executive producer and director of “Crashing,” said that working with Cherry was a highlight of the series.

By the time Cherry was cast on “You,” a Lifetime and Netflix thriller about a serial killer, he began to realize he could hang up his office attire and call himself a professional actor.

“They told me what my per-episode pay rate was going to be,” Cherry recalled. “I thought they meant that would be for the entire season. And I still was thrilled: Oh, my God, I can make this work.”

“Severance” received the most Emmy nominations of any series this year — a total of 27, including for best drama and for best supporting actor in a drama for Cherry, who will compete against his co-stars Tramell Tillman and John Turturro. The series has elevated Cherry to new levels of visibility and acclaim as he works alongside performers like Adam Scott and Christopher Walken as well as Ben Stiller, a director and executive producer.

Cherry doesn’t find the relative fame of his “Severance” colleagues particularly intimidating. “I have no lack of confidence, in general,” he said. But he admitted that this confidence can sometimes slip away when it is time to deliver on set.

“I believe I can do a lot of things,” Cheery said. “But then on the day that I’m doing it, that’s when I’m really, like, ‘Oh, now I have to actually do it…’”

Cherry finds it more challenging to work in genres outside of comedy. “With comedy, I feel it in my bones,” he said, “I know when I’m doing good work and I know when I’m like, ‘hmm, I don’t really like that.’” As he branches into the strange hybrid sci-fi-mystery-drama space of “Severance,” Cherry said, “it is a bigger leap of faith for me.”

Season 2 of the series, which premiered in January, presented Cherry with adventures of varying scales, including acting in one-on-one scenes with Merritt Wever (the “Nurse Jackie” alumna who plays his character’s wife) or traveling to Minnewaska State Park Preserve in Ulster County, N.Y., to film an episode that sends him and his Lumon co-workers on a cold and treacherous expedition of discovery.

As Cherry recalled, the making of that episode was a trek in itself.

“We were going really deep into the park to get to these spots,” he said. “We would drive to the base of a mountain, then we would get in these Sno-Cats and drive further up. And then we would hike a bit to get to these locations.”

When not venturing into the snowy wilds or performing with the improv comedy group RaaaatScraps, Cherry lives in Bushwick with his wife, Anabella, and their dog, Shrek. For the Emmys ceremony in Los Angeles on Sept. 14, Cherry is planning to bring his mother and his father, who has become an especially proud promoter of his son’s accomplishments.

“He essentially now introduces himself as ‘Hey, my son was nominated for an Emmy,’” Cherry said. “He’s always being like, ‘I was talking to people on the golf course and it came up.’ And I’m like, ‘It came up because you brought it up.’”