Rhea Seehorn still can’t believe what happened after Better Call Saul

Many actors harbour an irrational optimism. Whether as a survival mechanism in a trying industry or a stop-gap for their self-belief, they believe that their breakthrough role is one audition away, that someday soon a defining work will be created just for them to star in.

Rhea Seehorn, the breakout star of crime drama Better Call Saul, would like it known that she is definitely not one of those people.

“Never considered that,” Seehorn says, adding a laugh doused in healthy self-deprecation. “My aspirations were to simply do this for a living and I hoped that my work would become better in a way that would afford access to people and projects that were better than me.”

The joke, or perhaps the justice, of all this is that Seehorn really has claimed it all: she achieved her modest initial goals and now a defining work has been created for her. The show is Pluribus, a genre-bursting science-fiction experience from Vince Gilligan, creator of the canonised anti-hero thriller Breaking Bad and co-creator of its prequel, Better Call Saul. As those “better” people and projects go, this might be the zenith.

Cloaked in secrecy since Apple TV bought the idea from Gilligan in September 2022 and committed to producing two complete seasons, Pluribus is galvanised by a Twilight Zone-on-steroids concept that changes our present-day world and its population in a deeply fundamental way. The one person who isn’t changed? Seehorn’s Carol Sturka, a successful romantasy author with a thick streak of self-loathing and zero experience in saving the planet.

Primarily set in the desert city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, as were Gilligan’s previous shows, Pluribus is a grand creative framework. It’s a kind of reverse puzzle-box, in that you start with a staggering answer while the many questions that led there are unknown. My notes for the first episode alone are chaotic: “Invasion of the Body Snatchers … Jacques Tati … The Stand …” The official logline is “the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness”.

“[Reading it], I had the experience I imagine you had when you watched the pilot – ‘this is bananas, and where is it going? I need to know what happens next. What will she do? What is this new world like?’” Seehorn says. “There’s a shift from physical threat to psychological threat, but I knew even within the first episode that Vince was playing with tropes in a really fun way. It would be funny, then wrenchingly upsetting, and by the time Carol was talking to the television, I could hear a musicality.”

Speaking during a press day in Los Angeles, the 53-year-old Seehorn is in turn engaging, droll and enthusiastic. Her professional circumstances somewhat mirror Carol’s personal ones: as a working actor who most often supplied expert sarcasm in the margins of Hollywood sitcoms, Seehorn’s career was fundamentally changed by Better Call Saul, one episode of which also launched her directorial career. She’s been trying to make sense of it since.

“It’s hard to accept your great fortune while a part of you is terrified to say you deserve the good things that have come to you,” Seehorn says. “It’s hard to take it in.”

If Gilligan is keeping quiet about what Pluribus is about, he’s been vocal about how it wouldn’t exist without Seehorn. When Better Call Saul debuted in 2015, Seehorn’s Kim Wexler, a fellow lawyer alongside the show’s lead character, Bob Odenkirk’s future Breaking Bad consigliere Saul Goodman, was a small supporting role. But Seehorn’s performance, tamped down and increasingly amoral, was so compelling that Kim Wexler became essential first to the show, and second to the science-fiction concept that Gilligan was secretly mulling over in his head.

In 2022, when the final season of Better Call Saul was in post-production, Gilligan told Seehorn that he was working on a new series and had written the lead role for her. Gilligan, whom Seehorn rates as “one of the greatest television writers of all time”, didn’t want to make Pluribus if Seehorn was unwilling to play Carol. Seehorn replied “what’s my call time?” and then burst into tears of happiness.

Gilligan’s faith in Seehorn was partially instinctual, as Carol Stucka is in many ways the opposite of Kim Wexler, a part for which Seehorn was twice nominated for an Emmy. Carol is wilful, quick to overreact and fiercely private. At times, she’s as worrying as the new reality that’s overtaken the show’s world. Seehorn loved playing the character.

“A lot of it had to do with [Gilligan’s] keen observance of the oddity of our behaviour when we’re backed up against the wall. We don’t all act heroic, and we don’t all act cool. Most of us are just big giant messes clawing at the drapes,” she says. “You try to drill down on what’s the most ‘in shock’ you’ve ever been, what are the absurd arrays of behaviour you might go through in grief, and about being knocked out so hard but knowing you have to keep going.”

There’s always been a resilient streak to Seehorn’s own story. One of two daughters to parents both employed by the United States Navy – her mother was an executive assistant, her father an agent with Naval Investigative Service – Deborah Rhea Seehorn had an itinerant childhood. Her first creative love was painting, but while studying studio art at university, Seehorn discovered acting via an elective class and was hooked. In the late 1990s, she pursued theatre roles in Washington and then New York, before relocating to Los Angeles for screen work in 2002. Better Call Saul plucked her from the margins 15 years later.

“She doesn’t know how great she is,” her Better Call Saul co-star and now close friend, Bob Odenkirk, declared in 2022; and even now, Seehorn baulks at the idea she’s elevated herself. As she sees it, Pluribus was a make-or-break test she had to pass.

“I was in almost everything except five or six scenes. It was a really demanding role,” she says. “Carol’s emotional state, being that angry or grief-stricken, or playing against those things, then the mental gymnastics I went through to deliver the story Vince wanted to get out there, they were all challenging.”

Pluribus is technically only the second time that Seehorn has been the lead actor on a television show. The first was 2009’s Eva Adams, a comedy where she would play a boorish man turned into a woman by a witch’s spell – it was cancelled after an unaired pilot was produced. That kind of setback was part and parcel of Seehorn’s career before Vince Gilligan and Better Call Saul, and this time as the proverbial No.1 on the call sheet, she had no illusions about what her standing allowed.

“I understood that I was the main access point for the audience into this world, and I was responsible for showing up on time fully prepared, to be respectful of everyone else’s contributions, and be ready to collaborate instead of giving the performance you planned in your trailer beforehand,” Seehorn says. “I’m never making a scene by myself, I’m making it with 300 other people.

“Does it get better than that?” she asks, smiling. “I don’t think so.”

Pluribus is streaming on Apple TV from November 7.

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