How Rhea Seehorn Reacted to Reading the Mind-Bending ‘Pluribus’ Pilot Script

Rich has found the one scenario where he would happily give up his individuality: the golf course.

"I would not mind being part of a hive where I can get every single golfer that's on planet Earth to have those skills in me," Rich told Rhea Seehorn, star of Vince Gilligan's "Pluribus." He was clear about the limits of the offer. "Just for golfing because I'm always cursing at myself and I'm not good." Everywhere else, he said, he is "100% rooting" for her character to hold on to her individuality.

Seehorn had bad news for him. Drawing on what the cast learned while figuring out how to play croquet for the show, she explained that joining the hive gives you the muscle memory and the skills, "but your physical body is still yours." She said she couldn't throw a football like a pro quarterback just because she had his skills in her. Rich did the math on himself: even with the skills of Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus inside him, would he still struggle because of his physical attributes? Seehorn said it depends on what those attributes are. "They're not good at all," he admitted.

The joke opened a real conversation. Rich pointed out that his throwaway line about wanting to join a hive got read as a window into how he thinks, which is part of what makes the show work. Seehorn said she would "definitely fight for individuality," though both have run into plenty of people who say they would just join. Rich said it comes up for him at dinner parties.

So is "Pluribus" a story about the individual versus the collective? Seehorn called that "one thing that the show is about" but not the only thing. She said she and Gilligan enjoyed the press junkets because people kept sharing their own readings. One woman told her the whole series was a metaphor for grief, comparing it to being so deep in mourning that everyone telling you to cheer up "might as well be a foreign species." Seehorn's reaction: "Okay, but sure." Her approach with Gilligan, she said, is "just yes and. It's about all of that stuff."

She does believe Gilligan is asking big questions about "what does it mean to be an individual, to have independent thought but while you're still part of a community," and what people owe to civilization to make it work.

Rich reminded her that her last visit came just after "Better Call Saul" ended, when she said she was doing Gilligan's next project but couldn't say what it was. Her yes came before she knew anything. "If he was like I want you to play a park bench I'd be like all right, what's the call time?"

Gilligan never pitched it. Seehorn said he called to tell her he had written something for her, that he didn't want to describe it, and that she could wait to say yes until she read the script. She said yes on the spot. Rich's read: "He reserved you." Seehorn agreed, and added that Gilligan had already told others from the "Better Call Saul" set, which she did not know at the time. When she told colleagues she hoped to work with them again on whatever came next, they simply said, "Sure."

Then the pilot arrived. "I pretty much had the same experience I'm imagining a lot of viewers of the show did where I was like what is happening? This is bananas. I don't understand." For a long time she didn't have the second script, and she wondered if she was "just going to sit in my house for really long period of time." Partially true, she laughed.

The questions kept the set talking. Seehorn said the cast and crew would stay up into the wee hours asking each other what they would do, and that one scene, in which a writer learns her wife thought her work was "kind of a hack," hit everyone as a worst nightmare. Rich noted that is especially true for anyone in the arts or a subjective field.

Seehorn tied it to every Gilligan show. What would a chemistry teacher do with a terminal diagnosis? What would his brother-in-law the cop do? And on "Better Call Saul," she said, the writers began with a question: "What is the question if the answer is become Saul Goodman?" From there, they unraveled the story backwards.