“Kim has not seen ‘Breaking Bad,’ so she’s unaware of the wall they’re running into,” declares actress Rhea Seehorn about the character of Kim Wexler she plays on “Better Call Saul.” For our recent webchat she continues, “It’s much easier to make 1,000 slightly bad decisions than one giant bad decision.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.
“Better Call Saul” is midway through its sixth and final season. Developing her acclaimed character (which is shockingly yet to receive an Emmy nomination), Seehorn admits, “Other than knowing she was going to be allowed to be complex, everything else was just coming a piece at a time, a jigsaw puzzle piece at a time. It was a very interesting dance. I was doing my own subtext and background work while they were doing theirs. We just had this feeding off of each other’s material in a way that wasn’t even spoken sometimes.”
The show tells the story of how Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) became the criminal lawyer Saul Goodman in the Emmy-winning drama series “Breaking Bad.” Seehorn plays his partner in life, having developed an endearing relationship through unconditional support. But they can enable each other’s dangerous impulses.
Throughout the most recent episodes of the season, Jimmy and Kim plan to damage Howard Hamlin’s (Patrick Fabian) reputation so they can pressure a case settlement. In the mid-season finale, Jimmy’s work for a drug cartel and these plans meet in a horrific end as Lalo (Tony Dalton) shoots Howard confronting Jimmy and Kim. Seehorn reveals, “Even though Patrick, Bob and I lived together for most of the seasons, Patrick kept it a secret from us that Hamlin was going to be shot. Kim and Jimmy have tried so hard to compartmentalize and pretend that there are no consequences to their actions. For it to literally be laid at their feet is pretty audacious.”
In approaching Howard confronting Kim, Seehorn reflects, “They often make the audience my biggest confidant in the room, because they are aware that she is thinking other things than what she’s displaying. She’s listening. I plotted out what she is absorbing and what she’s ignoring.”
Seehorn directed her first episode of the series with “Hit and Run.” After more than five seasons, Kim has her first ever scene with Mike (Jonathan Banks). As Kim drew on post-it notes for their scheme against Howard, she also drew in her planning. She explains, “I had trouble for directing as I don’t know lenses and camera language, so I would do drawings. There’s one I did where they’re talking on the bed. It is the exact position of a drawing of a woman that has been on the other side of the wall for the entirety of the series. It’s also a drawing I did in real life. No one will know that but it was fun for me.”
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