Rhea Seehorn credits years of trust with Vince Gilligan and the same “Better Call Saul” crew approach for the near-silent intensity of “Pluribus”—and she traces that craft to one steady rule: kindness on set.
On the set of “Better Call Saul,” Rhea Seehorn remembers an argument scene with Jimmy McGill—Bob Odenkirk playing him—that ended with a tiny instinct she didn’t even know she was making.
Near the finish of a take, Seehorn smiled without realizing it. She says she did it to soften something. partly because she knows how often women in this business are told to temper themselves. Then showrunner and director Peter Gould noticed. He came over afterward. gently. to tell her he’d loved the way she ended it in rehearsal—without the smile.
Seehorn took it in as correction and as a turning point. “That was the beginning of me starting to trust that they just want me to play this role,” she said. “It is not my business to worry about whether people like her or not.”
That kind of trust—scene by scene, script by script—sits underneath “Pluribus,” the series Gilligan built around Seehorn and the one for which she’s receiving an IndieWire Honor.
The show asks her to carry nearly every frame, including long passages with no dialogue at all. She calls it extraordinary work, but she’s also clear it’s not a one-person achievement. “I am not alone,” she said. “I have 250 people doing a dance with me with lights and sound and dolly and all of that stuff.”.
She has a theater background. and collaboration isn’t just a principle for her—it’s how she thinks about performance. Stage actors, she said, can be dismissed as “too big” for camera. “Then you’re watching bad theater,” she said. What theater actually trained her to do. she added. is what “Pluribus” demands: how to hold a space. how to breathe with an audience. and how to invite people in without signaling every turn.
“In the silent passages in ‘Pluribus,’” she said, “I’m just thinking the thoughts. And I’m kind of trying to invite this audience through the lens to go down this rabbit hole with Carol.”
When Vince Gilligan first told her he’d written something for her, he didn’t give much of a pitch. He told her it has nothing to do with the “Breaking Bad” world. It has a slight sci-fi bent, he said. He wasn’t ready to send the script yet. That was it.
She waited a month. When she finally read it. she described her reaction in steps that mirror the show itself: “funny. then strange. then mysterious. then suspenseful. then deeply upsetting.” “I thought: ‘This wily monster. I would be obsessed with this show if I watched it,’” she said. “And then I’m like, ‘Oh, wait — I’m gonna be in it.’”.
Seehorn also speaks about the practical weight of being number one on the call sheet—first up and last up. day after day. She describes the prep, the sleep, the discipline required to show up with ideas instead of just opening your eyes. But her responsibility, she says, extends beyond her own performance.
She remembers how the show’s sound mixer. Phil Palmer. figured out a way for her to speak to another actor through a television screen in real time while the camera rolled—an actor standing just offstage. connected by phone—because he thought it would free her performance. “I just wanted to cry,” she said. “He’s doing that so my performance could be as great as it could be. and he’s never going to get credit for that. There’s not going to be any footnote at the end of the episode. That’s just him going the extra mile because it might help tell the story better and give me the chance to soar.”.
To her, that’s the point. She learned the ensemble focus from “Better Call Saul” as well as theater. where the group is always the story’s engine. “One of my favorite things about my job is that it’s a collaborative art form. not a solo art form. ” she said. “Whenever I can invest in that, my work gets better and the joy in it grows bigger.”.
Gilligan, she added, operates with a strict “no-asshole” policy on his sets and means it. She endorses the rule with the perspective of someone who has seen it fail. In the rare moments she’s witnessed genuinely bad set behavior. she said her first instinct is always to laugh—because she assumes it can’t be real. “I always think it’s a joke first,” she said. “Because it’s like. ‘Are you a character in a movie about bad actors?’ I never think it’s real first and then I’m like. ‘Holy shit.’”.
She’s also thought about why that kind of behavior persists and why it sometimes gets rewarded. “Don’t tell me you can’t be successful and a brilliant genius without being a dickhead,” Seehorn said. “Obviously that’s not true.”
Recently. she said. people from projects she worked on decades ago reached out to tell her they were glad to see hard work and decency recognized. “It’s really great to see people work their ass off and get rewarded for it. ” she said. “rather than the people we all know where you’re like. ‘Hmm. why did that person get rewarded for that behavior?’”.
Her argument is practical, not sentimental. Scream at people and you might get compliance. Treat them like partners and you get something else entirely. “Your crew and your cast — they will go to the mat for you,” she added.
The bar, she acknowledges, isn’t actually that high. “We are three-dimensional humans with ideas and bad days and breakups and people go through everything,” she said. “It’s sad that that has to be the line we shouldn’t go below, but really, that is the line. Just don’t be an asshole.”
For Seehorn. it circles back to what it takes to make “Pluribus” possible in the first place: the 250 people who set alarms. showed up. and are waiting. “I still ran away with the circus,” she said. “And I know so many people out of work right now. I owe it to the spirit of all of that to be aware that this is still icing on the cake.”.
In 2026, she says, it somehow still sounds radical.
Season 1 of “Pluribus” is now streaming on Apple TV.
Rhea Seehorn Pluribus Vince Gilligan Apple TV Better Call Saul Bob Odenkirk IndieWire Honors Phil Palmer Peter Gould Hollywood decency no-asshole policy