Our live with Cookie Cutter’s director and Cherry’s new voice actor turned into one of the deepest conversations we’ve ever had – about anger, vulnerability, and what a character can cost you
There are lives you go into knowing roughly where they’ll land. And then there are lives like this one.
We knew Stefano Guglielmana well by now – his punk rock instincts, his ability to say something genuinely profound and immediately follow it with a joke. We knew Cookie Cutter, its fury and its soul. What we didn’t know was Gracen Maverick. Not yet.
By the end of this live, we did. And we had a feeling you’d want to know them too.
The Universe Chose Gracen
When asked why he picked Gracen Maverick to voice Cherry, Stefano Guglielmana didn’t hesitate for a second:
“I didn’t choose Gracen. The universe chose Gracen.”
It sounds like something Cherry herself would say – abrasive, instinctive, final. And it captures exactly what this live felt like: not an interview, but a reckoning. A conversation about voices, identity, anger, and what it means to pour yourself into a character until the line between you and her starts to blur.
On finding Cherry’s voice
Stefano described the casting process with characteristic directness. The challenge was enormous: Cherry already existed, already had a personality, already had a sound. Every voice actor auditioning had to step into someone else’s shoes – and make them fit.
“We had this shitty request. We were looking for somebody who was able to do that – with the premise that right now we’ll try to match what we have of Cherry, but in the future it would be cool if the person who takes the role will find their own way into her.”
When Gracen’s audition came in, the decision was immediate. “Between all of these people, Gracen’s voice was perfect. The team was like, ‘Yo, this sounds like Cherry, man.’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, this is it. This is Cherry 100%.'” In fact, once they got on a call together and Gracen read two lines, Stefano had already made up his mind: “It’s yours. It’s yours.”
On anger, vulnerability, and the well Cherry draws from
Gracen speaks about Cherry the way someone speaks about a mirror they’ve been staring into for a long time.
“In any case of anger, there is always an underlying baseline. You’re not just mad to be mad – it is stemming from something, whether it’s vulnerability, fear, past trauma. Before the audition, I felt that. There is this unapologetic festering rage that lives in her, and it’s going to come out.”
What surprised even Gracen was how personal the process became. Recording Cherry isn’t performance – it’s something rawer than that: “I get to be there. Every time I hit record for Cherry, I get to be there.” There were moments, they confide, where they genuinely teared up in the booth – stopped, breathed, and fed the emotion back into the mic.
Stefano recognized exactly what Gracen was describing. “A lot of times anger comes from layers and layers of other things that become so massive that you just start screaming. Pain weaponized.” And Cherry, for him, has always been that channel: “When I’m upset and I have a lot of anger, she’s coming out – to celebrate my anger in a destructive way, but in a beautiful way.”
On what Cherry means to Stefano
He’s been working on this character for almost eight years. He has no intention of stopping.
“She started having a voice of her own. The more we were working with her through the years, she started becoming something that was not in control. When I was depressed, when I was in struggle in life, I was drawing – and there was this drawing of Cherry smoking a cigarette, telling me: ‘What’s going on, boy? You want to give up now?’ And I was like, ‘What the hell are you telling me right now? I’m drawing you and you’re telling me I don’t have to give up.'”
Cherry became, in his words, “a really fierce part of me that talks to me and that talks through me.”
On being non-binary in a world that likes to put voices in boxes
The voice acting industry has historically sorted voices into rigid categories – by gender, by archetype, by expected range. Gracen has spent a good part of their career learning to stop apologizing for not fitting neatly into any of them.
“I came into voice acting feeling like I had to sound a certain way. Even though I identified as non-binary, I was born biologically female, and there were moments in the very beginning where I’d embody certain female characters and it felt like my old voice – and I hated that.”
That anxiety, they explain, has gradually become something else entirely. “As I’ve moved forward, I love that my voice is naturally deeper. I love that I can go really low. I love that I’ve voiced young children, boys, a teenage guy. For me, having both the desire and the ability to fit into all of those different spaces – through a creative lens, it’s more of a superpower.”
The freedom, they say, isn’t just professional. It’s personal. Voice acting gave Gracen permission to stop performing a version of themselves that didn’t fit, and to fall in love instead with the voice they actually have. Cherry, with her grit and her uncontainable edge, has been the perfect place to land: “Cherry My Beloved is just the perfect channel for that.”
Stefano, listening, couldn’t help but recognize something of himself in all of it. “I remember when I was the singer of a punk rock band and I was in the studio and they were isolating my voice and I was like – no, that’s me? Oh no.” He laughs, then turns serious: “It’s the construction of our own ego. Who am I? How do I want to sound? I want to sound authentic. But what is authentic? What is me?”
On the body that disappears – and doesn’t
Voice acting creates a strange paradox: the body seems to vanish the moment a performance hits a speaker or a headset. For Gracen, though, the body never really leaves.
“While the body does disappear on the other side, for me the body is all there is. It’s shaping everything that comes out of me. What they’re not seeing is me on the other side – and Lord, I might be hunched over looking weird, but it’s how I’m getting out exactly what I need.”
Recording Cherry in particular is a fully physical act. If Cherry is feeling it, Gracen is feeling it. Arms moving, weight shifting, the whole thing. “When I go into a character, it’s kind of the same way I approach it in theater. I’m that person. I’m there. I am Cherry. And if Cherry in all of her beautiful abrasiveness is really feeling it, then I’m feeling it.”
Stefano, who knows next to nothing about the technical side of voice acting by his own admission, found himself genuinely in awe: “The more you talk about technique and everything, the more I feel like an impostor. There is technique, there is a way of thinking – and all of these things I don’t know. It’s super fascinating.”
Gracen’s response was immediate: “I feel the same way about your end of things.” And that, perhaps, is what made this conversation so unexpectedly generous – two artists, each staring into the other’s craft with equal parts curiosity and humility.
The divorce plan – and what comes next
Stefano had already hinted at it on social media. On this live, he finally talked through it properly – calmly, without bitterness, with the relief of someone who has come out the other side of a long and exhausting process.
“I started making a mess one year ago. After we split with my ex-partners, there was a lot I couldn’t say – because if I did, I’d disclose details from the contract and they would mess me up hard. But I was so frustrated about what was happening. So I had the need to take it out there, and every time it’s like this, I do it through Cherry.”
The work of separating from the publisher – reclaiming platforms, working through documentation, moving the property back into his hands – took the better part of a year. Now it’s done. “I am happy. And I will leave this behind, because it’s poisoning. I will focus on the future.”
That future has a name: Overkill Plus. A new edition that will expand one area of the game at a time, starting with the Denzel Factory, adding quests, abilities, characters, and new systems – including a combo metering mechanic that rewards players for sustained brutality streaks. The logic is simple and characteristically Stefano: release, see if people support it, and keep going if they do.
“I still want to work at this after ten years. I still have a lot of things to say before moving forward. But let’s see how people perceive it – and let’s see what happens.”
No Other Words
The final question of the live was the heaviest one. Gracen didn’t even flinch.
To what extent are you telling Cherry’s story, and to what extent might Cherry be retelling yours?
The answer came fast, warm, completely sure of itself – the way Gracen tends to answer everything.
“It is one thousand percent a push and a pull. In the beginning, she intimidated me. Even in the audition, I was like – this girl is the embodiment of fire to me. And while I feel that in my heart, it’s just not something I get to be. So I was like: I’ve got to be that.”
No hesitation. No search for words. Just the truth, delivered with that particular energy that had kept the whole live running at full speed for the better part of an hour and a half.
“While she has her own core and I have my own personal core – those are completely different – they’re aligned. I feel aligned with her. And so when I’m voicing Cherry, I’m at the mic and I start talking, and it’s her. She’s going, and I’ve got to go.”
“She feeds me, I feed her. That’s how it feels.”
Stefano, for once, was the one at a loss for words. “Oh. No other words.”
Therapy Session
There was a beat after that. A long one.
Then Stefano laughed – that particular laugh of his, the one that sits right on the border between genuine amusement and mild existential crisis – and said what everyone in the room was probably thinking:
“Wow. Therapy session today.”
He wasn’t wrong. This live went places none of us had quite planned for. It started as a conversation about voice acting and Cookie Cutter and ended up somewhere considerably deeper – in the territory of identity, anger, what we carry inside us, and what art lets us do with it when nothing else will.
That’s the thing about Cherry. She has a way of pulling people in further than they expected to go.
She’s Going. We’ve Got to Go.
But Cherry isn’t done yet. Not even close.
The Overkill Plus update is coming, the Denzel Factory is getting expanded, and Gracen still has recording sessions ahead – more lines, more scenes, more of that particular alchemy that happens when they step up to the mic and let her take over.
Stefano, for his part, has no intention of slowing down. After almost eight years, after the publisher split, after everything – he is still here, still working, still convinced that Cherry is bigger than anything he’s been able to express so far.
“I still have a lot of things to say before moving forward. As long as I feel like working on it, I work on it.”
And Gracen, somewhere in Virginia, is right there with her.
She’s going. They’ve got to go. And honestly? So do we.
