Fans of Better Call Saul are accustomed to long waits in-between seasons. There was a year and a half between the fourth and fifth seasons, and now because of the pandemic, it’s likely to be at least another year and a half between the fifth season and the sixth and final season. The final season is not expected to begin filming at least until after Christmas, and with the virus raging and one of the drama’s stars, Jonathan Banks (who is 73 years old) in a high-risk category, shooting may have to wait a little longer.
However, Peter Gould and the writers are nevertheless busy writing the final season. According to Rhea Seehorn (who plays Kim Wexler on the series), they have just broken episode five or six of the final 13-episode season. Other than that, she doesn’t seem to know much else, or at least isn’t saying as much, including how much the final season will intersect with the Breaking Bad timeline. However, in her interview with Marc Maron this week, she did offer some other interesting and insightful revelations about her character.
For instance, Seehorn didn’t have a lot of work in the first two episodes of Saul — she had two lines in the pilot — but her character was informed early on by a small scene direction in which she fixed a trash can that Saul kicked while he wasn’t looking. “I was like oh, he does this a lot and she always cleans up after him,” she told Maron, which clued her into as to what kind of relationship the two had. But her character was also informed in the first season by something as simple as the fact that she did not use contractions.
“I didn’t have contractions in the first eight episodes,” she told Maron. “There was a part of me that wanted to ask them like ‘You don’t mind if I say wanna instead of want to or gonna?’ I was like, ‘No. Maybe this will unlock something,’ and it did. This person is so controlled about what she wants you to see and what she doesn’t want you to see, that maybe she also doesn’t really let people see what she’s thinking on her face. Maybe she’s also extremely still in her body.”
It’s the little things on Saul that mean so much, and of course, we learn over the course of five seasons how controlled she is, and what she’s hiding behind all of that control.
Seehorn also said that she and Patrick Fabian (who plays Howard Hamlin) were nervous early on in the series about whether their characters would be killed off. We “would flip, flip, flip through every new script and cheer at the end of each, ‘I’m not dead!’”
She also said that her co-star, Bob Odenkirk, had some insecurities early on, and if she asked him how to perform a scene, he would say, “You’re the real actor. You tell me.” He’s very hard on himself, Seehorn continued. “In his head he had this idea that, ‘I’m a sketch comedy guy,’ although I don’t think he thinks that way anymore.”
On a more personal note, Seehorn also said that she became friends with director Lynn Shelton — Marc Maron’s girlfriend, who passed away unexpectedly a few months ago — due to reaching out to her on Twitter after watching Shelton’s lovely Your Sister’s Sister. Shelton was obsessed with Better Call Saul and would DM Seehorn after episodes to talk about her performance. The two had talked frequently about working together before the pandemic arrived. Unfortunately, Shelton died only a few months later.
Better Call Saul is expected to return for its final season in 2021. Hopefully, it will be the year that Seehorn is finally nominated for an Emmy.
Source: WTF with Marc Maron