How Rhea Seehorn Developed Her Memorable Better Call Saul Kim Wexler Character

Rhea Seehorn built one of television's most memorable characters out of a single line in a pilot, a set of stage directions about a trash can, and a missing apostrophe.

On The Rich Eisen Show, Seehorn walked through how she found Kim Wexler on Better Call Saul, why the ponytail was the subject of "so many meetings," and how Patrick Fabian kept the biggest secret of the series from everyone, including his own wife.

What Would You Do?

Rich started with the thread that runs through Vince Gilligan's shows: what would you do? What would a chemistry teacher do with a terminal diagnosis, his wife when she finds out, his brother-in-law the cop?

Seehorn said Better Call Saul started the same way, by working backward. "What is the question if the answer is become Saul Goodman?" she said. "What happened in your life that it would be solved by becoming Saul Goodman?"

Why Kim Doesn't Walk Out the Door

Rich admitted that he spent the series thinking Kim was smarter and better than the man she stood by, and kept waiting for her to walk out the door. She didn't, not until the very end.

For Seehorn, it was easy to understand. "He is smart in a different way. But he is very smart," she said. Kim, in her reading, wears "a little bit of a mask and an armor in the whole rest of the outside world," and believed this was the one person who "saw her for what she really truly is," just as she saw him for what he truly was.

She came to that conclusion early, during the pilot. Seehorn said Vince and Peter told the actors they didn't know where the relationship was going. The direction was that they met in the mail room, had been each other's closest confidant for more than 10 years, and nobody knew if it had ever been or would ever be romantic. "Can you guys just make it look like you're that close for 10 years?" she recalled. "So I was like, sure. We had one sentence in the pilot."

The Trash Can and the Backstory

That sentence, delivered while the two share a cigarette, told Seehorn that Kim would always draw a line around her work. But the stage directions told her more.

In the parking garage scene, the script said he takes the cigarette out of her mouth, smokes it and puts it back, and it didn't say she flinches. "That's a type of closeness and intimacy," she said. Then, walking back to the elevator, Kim rights the trash can he had kicked over, "without looking."

"I thought, oh, he does this a lot, number one," Seehorn said. "And number two, she is used to being around people that keep blowing things up and making messes and taking care of them without even thinking."

So she privately decided Kim was raised by an addict. She never said it out loud. Then, in what she remembered as season five, the show ran a flashback revealing Kim's mother is an alcoholic. "I was like, 'Huh, there you go.'"

No Contractions

That is how Seehorn always works, she explained. Scripts arrive one at a time, so she takes the puzzle pieces she has and reverse engineers why someone would behave this way. She said she is doing the same now with the first script of season two of her current show, and has no idea where it's going.

One of those puzzle pieces was grammar. Kim almost never used contractions. Her lines said "do not" and "will not" while other characters said "won't" and "don't." Seehorn thought about asking whether she could change them, then decided against it. "First of all, I don't want them to fire me," she said, laughing. She and Patrick Fabian felt the same way: "I can't believe I'm playing in this sand pit, and I really need to just keep a low profile."

Instead she asked what kind of person is that specific with language, and it became part of how she made Kim controlled about what she lets people know. About three seasons in, she finally asked the writers about it. "They were like, 'Oh, I didn't realize we did that.'"

The Ponytail Meetings

Rich asked whether Kim's tightly controlled hairstyle was purposeful too. "All purposeful," Seehorn said. "There were so many meetings about that ponytail."

It became "a barometer of how she was doing," she explained. Super coiled and tight, and then it would start to fall apart.

The Secret Patrick Fabian Kept

Then Rich got to what he called the seminal scene of the series, the one involving Patrick Fabian's character. Seehorn said she was shocked reading it, because it played as shocking on the page as it did on screen.

She, Fabian and Bob Odenkirk all lived together during filming, and Fabian was upstairs. "I was like, 'You didn't tell me,'" she said. He had kept the secret for multiple episodes, and he didn't even tell his wife, director Mandy Fabian, who found out when she watched the show.

The Last Shot

Rich confessed he still feels Kim can never quite quit him, even at the end. Seehorn revealed that one of the scenes they discussed was the actual last scene she shot.

She said she had to think hard to use Kim's emotions, not her own. "It can't be Rhea saying goodbye to Bob," she said. Press was on set that day, and every time someone asked her what the last day felt like, she said, "I would just start bawling. I was like, 'I'm so sorry. I can't actually do interviews today.'"