Merritt Wever Wins Guest Actress in a Drama Series​ 2025 Emmy for Severance Performance

The 2025 Creative Arts Emmys has named a winner for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series!

Merritt Wever scored the win for her powerful portrayal as Gretchen George in season 2 of Severance at the annual ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 6.

Because she was not present, presenter Jamie Lee Curtis accepted the award on Wever’s behalf.

Among the other nominees were Catherine O’Hara (The Last of Us), Cherry Jones (The Handmaid’s Tale), Gwendoline Christie (Severance), Jane Alexander (Severance) and Kaitlyn Dever (The Last of Us).

Wever, 45, put on a heartbreaking performance as the spouse of a Lumon employee in Severance.

Playing the wife Dylan George (Zach Cherry) in the Apple TV+ thriller, Wever finds a new sense of happiness with her husband’s “innie” that his “outie” had never brought out in her. However, she ultimately had to end the relationship to protect her husband’s job at Lumon in one of the show’s most emotional scenes.

Wever has been nominated for five Emmys throughout her career, winning in 2013 for her role in Nurse Jackie and again in 2018 for Netflix’s Godless. 

This year, Wever, Alexander and Christie made up three of Severance’s many nominations, which garnered 27 across the series.

O’Hara, 71, joined The Last of Us in season 2 as therapist Gail Lynden.

When she took on the role in January, she explained the dynamic between her character and her co-star Pedro Pascal’s lead Joel Miller.

“I have an odd relationship with Pedro’s character,” O’Hara told Entertainment Weekly. “You don’t quite know why she’s got…well, she’s got this edge to her, but it makes for some weird, good dark comedy, I think. So it’s there. I never want to deny the gift of humor.”

She also revealed that she learned about the post-apocalyptic series from one of her sons, who works on the show as a set dresser.

In addition to her nomination for The Last of Us — one of the show’s 16 total — O’Hara is also up for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Patty Leigh in The Studio. 

Jones, 68, took on the role of Holly Maddox, the mother of star June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) in The Handmaid’s Tale. 

The Hulu drama came to a conclusion in May and featured Jones as she reunited with June when she liberated Boston.

The series was originally based on a novel by Margaret Atwood and followed June’s life in a dystopian world called Gilead following a Second American Civil War, where women are oppressed and only used in society for their fertility.

This is Jones’ third time being nominated for this character in the category, which she won in 2019. It is her sixth overall Emmy nomination.

Christie, 48, plays Lorne, the leader Lumon Industries’ Department of Mammalians Nurturable, in Severance.

She first appeared in season 2 after the mysterious department was revealed in season 1.

In March, she told PEOPLE that although the goats “were really difficult” — she jokingly called them “divas” — it was “extraordinary” working on the psychological thriller.

“There’s so many juxtapositions happening and we’re so activated by it,” she explained. “What I love is that within us are ignited a million stories. What I love about the show is that we’re not given facts, it’s our own story. How we pose ourselves on the story, how we receive it, where we are taking it. And then, we enter into the land of fan forums and fan theory where people are coming together and being highly creative in the exchange of ideas and forming stories in groups across the world.”

“It’s a magnificent thing to be a part of,” Christie added. “I love that in an age of facts, here, we have no answers.” 

Christie has been nominated for an Emmy once before in 2019 for her performance in Game of Thrones. 

Alexander, 85, made her mark on Severance as Sissy Cobel in a season 2 episode titled, “Sweet Vitriol.”

Her time on the show may have been short, but the character held a lot of significance. Sissy was the aunt of Patricia Arquette’s Harmony Cobel and is a deep believer in the principles of Lumon.

In a March interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Alexander revealed that she was “a great fan of the first season” and “was thrilled” to be offered a guest role.

“Sissy is certainly theatrical,” she shared. “There’s high drama there. I chose to take it there.”

This is Alexander’s eighth Emmy nomination, two of which she won: one in 2005 for HBO’s Warm Springs and another in 1981 for Playing for Time.

Dever, 28, plays the extremely polarizing character Abby in The Last Of Us.

She entered the series in season 2 with a tough-as-nails, vengeance-seeking persona that she explained to Elle was a sign of the grief and pain she was carrying. Reflecting on how she channeled that energy, Dever said the character’s emotions are a “universal human experience.”

“I wanted a lot of the broken parts of Abby to show through in her eyes—I wanted to humanize her as much as I possibly could,” she revealed. “It’s easy to call Abby a villain because of how she presents herself in the world—her tough exterior. But [she’s also] this raw, broken, vulnerable person. It’s important to see that.”

This is Dever’s second Emmy nomination, following her 2020 nomination for her supporting role in Dopesick.

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The 2025 Creative Arts Emmys are being presented in Los Angeles on Saturday, Sept. 6 and Sunday, Sept. 7. The full show will be broadcast on Saturday, Sept. 13 at 8 p.m. ET on FXX.