Rhea Seehorn has had quite the lucrative TV career, from starring in “Better Call Saul” and “Whitney” — but the pilot episode of Apple TV’s “Pluribus,” which released last November, took her to new extremes as an actor.
“This epic pilot that is the night of hell. It’s not like, ‘Just get through Thursday and Friday. They’re hard and then we’ll do the scene where you’re sitting and staring.’ It was all challenging to me,” Seehorn said during Variety‘s Making a Scene conversation presented by HBO Max. “This whole thing was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Created by Vince Gilligan, reuniting Seehorn with her “Better Call Saul” creator and showrunner, the “Pluribus” pilot sets up Carol’s (Seehorn) end-of-the-world adventure after her wife (Miriam Shor) unexpectedly collapses. When a desperate Carol rushes her to a nearby hospital, she’s met with the realization that everybody else on Earth has turned into a collective hive mind.
While filming such a technically challenging sequence, it was crucial to always consider Carol’s raw emotions, Seehorn said: “Something is happening at a very large scale to a lot of people, but I’m still trying to get my wife medical help at this point. I understood from the get-go with Vince that in this fantastical world, in these fantastical circumstances, Carol needed to be as real as possible. I am the audience’s access point into it.”
Seehorn explained that Shor was present during filming as much as possible, even if her character was off-screen in a given scene: “Touching her hand, I don’t know why, it immediately brought up, for me, the whole idea of having that tether with somebody that you know on some deep, deep level, if you lose them, you’ve lost more than just a partner. You’ve lost your tether to the world.”
The pilot was filmed over the course of 50 days in a block with Episode 2, requiring hundreds of extras during the hospital scene, which was all done practically. Cinematographer Marshall Adams, who also worked on “Better Call Saul,” said Gilligan and him took inspiration from that show while leaning “toward wider lenses.”
For the sequence when Carol frantically drives away from the hospital, Adams designed a new system with an LED screen that went on front of the truck with a cap on top, so all the light when Carol is driving comes exclusively from the LED screen. Then, the truck was placed on a biscuit, “a stripped-down Telsa that you can put the car on.”
“We put the B-camera facing forward so that was a live image that was on the screen for her. She could see and interact with things in real time but without having any shadows from it,” Adams said. “It started out as a very kind of simple idea.”
Seehorn said the production set up a rare crew-only screening: “I loved seeing the crew so proud of their work and to have that boost of, ‘Wow, the scope that we meant to put on camera is on camera.’ The time, dedication and the artistry, it got on screen. It wasn’t lost.”
Adams concluded, “It’s one of those things where you just kind of find it as you go along. It’s not something you can necessarily put your finger on when you first start a show. You have some ideas and you figure out what works and pretty soon, it reveals itself.”