Rhea Seehorn has had quite the lucrative TV career, from starring in “Better Call Saul” and “Whitney” — but the pilot episode of Apple TV’s “Pluribus,” which released last November, took her to new extremes as an actor.
“This epic pilot that is the night of hell. It’s not like, ‘Just get through Thursday and Friday. They’re hard and then we’ll do the scene where you’re sitting and staring.’ It was all challenging to me,” Seehorn said during Variety‘s Making a Scene conversation presented by HBO Max. “This whole thing was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Created by Vince Gilligan, reuniting Seehorn with her “Better Call Saul” creator and showrunner, the “Pluribus” pilot sets up Carol’s (Seehorn) end-of-the-world adventure after her wife (Miriam Shor) unexpectedly collapses. When a desperate Carol rushes her to a nearby hospital, she’s met with the realization that everybody else on Earth has turned into a collective hive mind.
While filming such a technically challenging sequence, it was crucial to always consider Carol’s raw emotions, Seehorn said: “Something is happening at a very large scale to a lot of people, but I’m still trying to get my wife medical help at this point. I understood from the get-go with Vince that in this fantastical world, in these fantastical circumstances, Carol needed to be as real as possible. I am the audience’s access point into it.”
