Our 2022 Annual Report continues with the announcement of Rhea Seehorn as our TV Performer of the Year, who joined us for an interview about Better Call Saul and beyond. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2022. Plus, check out our Top 25 TV Shows of 2022 list here.
After years of Better Call Saul, there’s one question Rhea Seehorn gets all the time, and here is the answer. “It is mostly my own hair,” she says of the famous Kim Wexler ponytail, which she sported for most of the show’s six-season run. “And then there’s one extra piece that’s put in the center that is false, that can be curled and sprayed really tight, which your natural hair wraps around, and it can stay up for a longer period of time. Because if you’ve ever had your hair sprayed and curled with heat-styling tools for 14 hours, you know it can be very damaging.”
Like so many things about Better Call Saul, the ponytail is so much more than a hairstyle — it’s packed with meaning and careful thought. As Consequence’s 2022 TV Performer of the Year explains, designing her character’s signature look was a collaboration between herself, costume designer Jennifer Bryan, makeup artist Cheri Montesanto, and hair stylist Trish Almeida after conversations about “the working women that we grew up with, who really were trying to get ahead in business and it was imperative to them to make it — they couldn’t take no for an answer.”
Those women, Seehorn says, didn’t change their looks that often, wearing the same clothes, carrying the same purse, and wearing the same earrings every day. “And they never changed their hair. They didn’t have time. So that’s how we came up with a ponytail, and it had a small curl because we thought she wasn’t trying to be masculine in a masculine world, but she also wasn’t going to put sexuality first. So we just put this small curl in it.”
Over time, the ponytail itself took on a deeper significance. “It evolved into this thing with the writers, where it became a barometer of how she was feeling — of her unraveling or being tightly coiled. Then it just became this entire other character.”
Better Call Saul (AMC)
The brilliance of Seehorn’s performance as Kim goes far beyond hairstyles, of course. During the early days of Saul, Seehorn’s presence in the series was limited — Kim has exactly two lines in the pilot. But, she says, “I didn’t have a lot of lines, but I was in a lot of pages — you know, present in a scene where she says very little. I thought, well, if somebody in the Better Call Saul world doesn’t speak a lot, you have a choice about whether that’s a position of power or a position of weakness. And I thought one of those is a better storytelling device than the other in this case. And so I went with, ‘It’s a position of power,’ and that started to dictate actually how I made the entire character.”
And thus she began drawing Kim out of these context clues: “I thought, if she’s that precise and economic in her language and there’s no fat to be trimmed there, then maybe she’s that way with her physicality. And I got very still in playing her.”
So much of Kim’s journey came directly from the scripts, Seehorn says. “With writing this good, that’s so thought out and so exquisitely designed, there’s clues everywhere.'”
In fact, a huge aspect of the character’s journey, for Seehorn, came out of one tiny moment from the show’s fourth episode, “Hero,” written by Gennifer Hutchison. “Howard [played by Patrick Fabian] leaves the room, and Gennifer wrote in the script, ‘A small, barely perceptible smirk comes across Kim’s face when she’s alone.’ I loved it, because I had been thinking myself, there’s an attraction-repulsion with his antics that Kim seems to have. I thought it was way more complex than, like, she loved a bad guy. To me, that’s over in one episode, who cares?”
“A small, barely perceptible smirk,” from Better Call Saul (AMC)
What that smirk revealed to Seehorn was that “there’s something in her that is also off-tilt, you know? Like sees like. Also, [Jimmy is] authentic in a world where everyone else is actually full of shit to her: Chuck is, Howard is. Jimmy at least was on the up and up. And she kind of thinks that what he’s doing is smart and funny sometimes — he’s coloring outside of the lines, but it’s just sort of being illegal and and I think she gets a kick out of it in spite of herself.”
Seehorn says that later, the writers told her that they made the decision to put the mention of a smirk in the script, “but they weren’t sure if it would work, and that they would just cut it in editing later if it didn’t make sense for Kim. Thankfully they decided it made sense.
“And I have no idea how they feel about this, but that was the beginning of me feeling this very cool dance going on, where I’m playing subtext and they’re writing things, and I’m responding to what they’re writing, and then they’re writing and responding to things that I’m doing. It was a very gratifying dance to feel so seen and so respected, down to the tiniest of nuances that I would put in those scenes.”
This led to Seehorn creating her own personal backstory for Kim that included an alcoholic parent (which she never told the writers about, but a flashback did reveal Kim’s mother to have a drinking problem in Season 4), and the evolving concept of Kim being an off-tilt person attracted to her match. This became central to the character’s arc in Season 6, as Kim and Jimmy get caught up in crafting a con together, only for tragedy to strike, leaving Kim to realize how their relationship has gotten too toxic to continue.
It’s the culmination of an arc that found its initial roots, years ago, in a scripted smirk. “It’s like this whole web,” Seehorn says. “People know that we don’t improv on the show. You have to do it to the letter — but that is not a restraint, that’s a gift. It’s the architecture. You can hang your hat on it because it’s not flimsy, it’s not going to change. It is solid and you can just dig for secrets in it. That is the gift of the writing on that show, but also the gift of [the writers] trusting their actors and their audiences to sit with those silences and to be okay with things that are open to interpretation.”
Better Call Saul (AMC)
It’s been months since the finale aired and even longer than that since it officially wrapped, but Seehorn is still sad about the end of Better Call Saul. “I love that show and everybody that worked on it so much. And I love that character, and I loved my relationship with the fans about that character. They still come up and talk to me about her, like she’s a three-dimensional human being, which warms my heart and is incredibly flattering.”
Also, she says that “as a fan of the show, not just somebody that’s in it, I think that [co-creator Peter Gould] nailed the ending. I think he did a great service to our audience and the way they were watching the story and honoring the characters and the characters’ own agency, and wrote this beautiful ending that I think lets them live on. It’s open to interpretation, but the interpretation does involve thinking about what happened the next day.”
A key aspect to Kim’s ending on the show is a sequence that takes place during the finale, as Kim comes across a legal aid group that seems to re-inspire her interest in the law. “Absent of that,” Seehorn says, “you would have removed the elements of seeing that she has at least opened the door to allowing herself to have a more authentic life again, instead of just staying out of the way and keeping her head down — she was living as sort of a shell in Florida.”
For Seehorn, it worked because it did not “wrap up everything in a bow. Peter and I talked about the fact that it was important that she doesn’t suddenly look like the old Kim, she’s not suddenly talking like the old Kim. It isn’t a restart, like nothing happened. But I’m glad they included the legal aid stuff, just because it was the very first sign that she saw any path forward to pursue any kind of passion.”
Peter Gould and Rhea Seehorn, behind the scenes of Better Call Saul (AMC)
Post-Saul, Seehorn continues to executive produce, star, and also serve as director on the AMC digital comedy Cooper’s Bar, which has a second season in the works. “It’s a group of my friends and we basically made it in [co-star/co-creator] Louis Mustillo’s actual backyard, partially as a conflation of stories from his real life of things that have happened in his backyard,” she says. “[Season 1] came out at the right time, while people were sitting home in the pandemic and making bars out of their own backyards. And they just really enjoyed that it’s this small story — it’s meta and it’s about the industry, but in the end it’s just about finding your own family in this world.”
She also stars in the upcoming Colin West indie film Linoleum alongside Jim Gaffigan, and is developing new projects with other writers. “I’m actively trying to work with people from the Better Call Saul family, particularly my producers,” she teases. “I’m trying to do something with Peter, and Bob [Odenkirk] and I have things that we are already planning to do together. Patrick [Fabian] and I want to do things, I want to do more stuff with [executive producer] Melissa Bernstein. I’m basically trying to never leave that family.”
Which leads us to the most exciting project on the horizon: A new Apple TV+ series from Better Call Saul co-creator Vince Gilligan that, according to reports, will be more along the lines of The Twilight Zone than Breaking Bad. While details about the show are under tight wraps, Seehorn confirms that she’s been cast as the show’s protagonist. “I did not collaborate on it at all, but [Gilligan] came to me and said that he wrote something for me, which made me cry,” she says.
At the time, beyond tears, she also did have “lots of questions. He wasn’t ready to show me scripts, and I never want to speak for Vince, but there were stories and things and ideas that he had been musing on for a while, is what he told me. And then things started clicking into place and he decided to write it for me, which is very great.”
Seehorn couldn’t say much else about it, but confirms that “it is a departure, as has been said in the press — it has nothing to do with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.” She adds with a laugh, “I know some people are not going to believe that it’s not actually a Kim Wexler spinoff until the day it airs, but it’s not.”
The confusion is understandable, though. Thanks to Seehorn, Kim Wexler is going to be awfully hard to forget.