Emmy Winner Rhea Seehorn Talks ‘Stick,’ ‘Pluribus,’ ‘Better Call Saul’ w/Rich

The last time Rhea Seehorn visited the show, "Better Call Saul" had just ended. Now she is back as an Emmy winner for "Pluribus," with a new role in season 2 of "Stick," which premieres Wednesday, November 4th on Apple TV with two episodes. Rich, a self-described massive fan of everything she does, noted the change of scenery from one of Kim Wexler's last scenes on a bus. "Little different vibe this time," Seehorn agreed.

Faking the golf swing in "Stick"

Seehorn said "Stick" leans far more comedic than what she has done in a while. "There is definitely dark comedy in 'Pluribus,' and there was in 'Better Call Saul' as well," she said, "but this had a lot more of the comedy stuff, and it was so much fun." The cast kept her cracking up: Owen Wilson, Marc Maron and Timothy Olyphant, "they're all hilarious," plus Judy Greer, whom she loves.

Is she a golfer? "Not at all," Seehorn said, laughing that her friends find it funny that people keep asking her to do sporty things on screen. She needed lots of lessons, because even with a golf double and plenty of tricks, "they need to have some baseline to start with." Her instructor was Michael Cho at City Golf. Her character is supposed to be a swing coach for professionals, someone who almost could have gone pro herself, so the swing had to look right.

Rich warned her that sports people "can be total a-hole sticklers." Seehorn knows. She tried to explain the swing mechanics on air before giving up: "It's all gone now." Most of her golfing in the show happens on a simulator, coaching Wilson's character. Wilson is "so great," she said, and everybody on the show has taken up golf, "maybe not Mark." Rich agreed Maron doesn't strike him as a guy sneaking in 18 holes.

Seehorn also flipped the sports-fan complaint on its head. When the showrunner, Jason Keller, asked if she played a certain sport for an upcoming episode, she told him she has probably never done anything that involves moving quickly or a ball. Add painting or drawing, though, and Wilson would be the one taking lessons. When she watches people paint badly on TV, she does what sports fans do: she gets "really irritated." "Nobody paints like that." Rich wondered if that included Bob Ross. "He's a real painter," Seehorn said. "What are you trying to say?"

The hive, the golf course and individuality

Rich combined her two latest shows. When he plays golf, he would not mind being part of a hive that gave him every golfer's skills on earth. Just for golf, he stressed. Otherwise, he is "100% rooting" for her "Pluribus" character to keep her individuality. Seehorn pointed out a catch the show established: in the hive you get the skills and the muscle memory, but your physical body is still yours. "I wouldn't be able to throw a football like a pro quarterback just because I have his skills in me," she said. Rich worked it out: even with Tiger Woods' and Jack Nicklaus' skills, he might still be bad. "It depends," Seehorn said. "I don't know what your physical attributes are." Rich: "They're not good."

That, Seehorn said, is one of the many brilliant things about the show: a joke about joining a hive becomes a window into how someone thinks. She would "definitely fight for individuality," but she has been surprised by how many people say they would just join. Is the show about individualism versus the collective? "I think it is one thing that the show is about," she said. On the press tour, she and Vince Gilligan heard all kinds of readings, including one woman who saw it as a metaphor for grief, where everyone telling you to cheer up might as well be a foreign species. Their approach was "yes, and." Gilligan, she said, is asking big questions about what it means to have independent thought while still being part of a community that we owe something to.

The call from Vince

Last time on the show, Seehorn could only say she was doing Gilligan's next project. How did he pitch it? "He didn't," she said. He told her he wrote something for her, didn't want to describe it, and would send the script when it was ready, and she could wait to say yes. "I said no, it's fine. Just yes." Rich's read: "He reserved you." Seehorn later learned Gilligan had told many people from the "Better Call Saul" crew, too, so when she would tell them she hoped to work together again, they already knew.

Reading the first script, she had the reaction a lot of viewers did. "What is happening? This is bananas." For a while she didn't have the second script and wondered if she would just sit in her house for long stretches. "Partially, that's true," she joked. The cast and crew would stay up into the wee hours debating what they would do. Rich noted that's always been the hook of Gilligan's shows, from a chemistry teacher with a terminal diagnosis to the question Seehorn said "Better Call Saul" started with: what happened in your life that it would be solved by becoming Saul Goodman?

Building Kim Wexler

Rich admitted he spent years yelling at Kim to walk out the door. Seehorn explained why she didn't. Kim thought Jimmy saw her for who she truly was, someone with "a mask and an armor" for the rest of the world. The pilot gave her almost nothing: the two of them met in the mail room and had been each other's closest confidant for 10-plus years. "We had one sentence in the pilot," she said.

So she built Kim from the stage directions. In the parking garage scene, Jimmy takes the cigarette out of her mouth, smokes it and puts it back, and the script doesn't say she flinches. Then she rights the trash can he kicked over, "without looking." Seehorn's conclusion: Kim was used to people blowing things up and cleaning up after them. "I bet she was raised by an addict," she thought. She never said it. Then, in season 5, a flashback revealed Kim's mom was an alcoholic.

That's her method, she said: take the puzzle pieces and reverse engineer why someone would behave that way. Kim's lines had almost no contractions. Rather than ask to change them, Seehorn made it part of how controlled Kim was about what she lets people know. When she asked about it three seasons in, the writers said they hadn't realized they'd done it. The ponytail was purposeful too, a barometer of how Kim was doing, tightly coiled and then falling apart. "There were so many meetings about that ponytail," she said.

Rich called one scene with Patrick Fabian the seminal scene of the series. Seehorn was shocked reading it. She, Fabian and Bob Odenkirk lived together while filming, and Fabian had kept the secret of his exit for multiple episodes, even from his wife, Mandy Fabian, who found out watching. Kim's final scene was the last one Seehorn shot. She worked to keep it Kim's goodbye and not "Rhea saying goodbye to Bob," and when press asked how the last day felt, she would start bawling.

Favorite "Pluribus" moments

Seehorn said season 1 felt like shooting a nine-hour movie, so picking favorites is hard. She named the grenade scene with Carolina, the voice translation scene with Manousos, played by Carlos Manuel Vesga, with a pink umbrella in the desert, and her Vegas scenes with Diabaté, played by Samba Schutte. She also loves the scenes where she's alone, which she says aren't really solo. The audience is her confidant, and Gilligan expects the same storytelling with no dialogue. Her crew, most of whom also worked on "Better Call Saul," has been with her 12 or 13 years. "I never ever feel alone," she said. She has the first script of season 2 and has "not a clue" where it's going.

Before she left, Seehorn asked Rich to watch "Stick" and judge her golf. Rich, a season 1 fan and a big Owen Wilson fan, promised he would.