Rhea Seehorn dug into personal tragedy in order to faithfully portray her character Carol’s mindset in the new Apple TV+ sci-fi drama Pluribus. She reteams with her Better Call Saul creator, Vince Gilligan.
Seehorn spoke to Blavity’s Shadow and Act ahead of the season premiere about finding Carol by diving into feelings of grief. However, at first, she was shocked when she got the script by Gilligan, which tells the story of a woman who becomes one of the few in the world to retain her sense of self while the rest of human society has been taken over by a strange alien force. A force that makes everyone part of a happy hive-mind.
What happened with she got the script?
“Carol’s certainly got a lot going on,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about it going in until Vince sent me this first script, and I was like, ‘Wow, what a ride as a viewer. And then you have to start doing your job and sitting down and doing the script analysis and the prep of what is the journey she’s going on? And also understanding that I am the audience’s access point to experiencing the insanity of like, what’s happening and she’s trying to figure it out.”
”She also has experienced this tremendous amount of grief, which is weighing her down,” she continued. “I have experienced grief in my life and have watched others go through grief, and it’s its own state of temporary insanity by itself, aside from what’s happening in the world. …It’s hard to get up off the floor some mornings when you’re in the midst of that, let alone if you’re grieving the state of the whole world and every friend and family member you’ve ever had.”
Why she says the stakes are high
Seehorn said that what she felt Gilligan wanted to bring to Carol was “to bring everything down to the most intimate. It’s about human nature.”
“It’s not a show that’s commenting on sci-fi, it’s not a show that’s a theme satire to tell you what to think about certain things. It is watching this human navigate these questions and letting it raise questions for you,” she said. “So I would ask myself in moments, like, let’s say, when she goes to Spain and she’s hoping that she can find some of the others to help her, there’s something in her that’s telling [her] this is not right and everybody’s acting like it’s fine. I’ve never flown to Spain and tried to solicit a bunch of other people to help me start a revolution against what I think are body-snatching aliens. But I’ve definitely been in rooms in times in my life where I thought something was of dire importance, and I’m yelling, ‘The barn is on fire!’ and everyone else is acting like it’s not that big of a deal, and I should just chill out. It’s that frustration. And then I’m trying to magnify that [because] these consequences [in Pluribus] are much larger. These stakes are much higher. So that’s what I would do; I would just look for…the thing that’s accessible that I do understand as a human, and then how do I rachet that up? How do I heighten it up to where the stakes are that [Gilligan’s] written?”
Pluribus is now streaming on Apple TV+.