Rhea Seehorn names her three favourite movies: “I love that allegorical element”
Any show that can state ‘created by Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan’ and ‘starring one of Better Call Saul’s lead actors’ is going to have some serious hype around it, and that’s proved to be the case with Pluribus, starring Rhea Seehorn.
The show has the premise that a mysterious wave of happiness has taken over the world, aside from one woman who has to try to work out what’s going on. Three episodes in and people are already hooked, with Seehorn’s author character Carol getting more and more confused by the hour.
Seehorn for her part says she has ‘no idea what’s going on’ so she’s not much help for those trying to decipher what the virus is all about on the Apple TV + drama, but she will probably be one of the first to know given Gilligan wrote the show specifically for her after they worked together on Better Call Saul for the best part of seven years.
Seehorn was nominated for two Emmys for her work on that show, which starred Bob Odenkirk as the criminal defence lawyer Saul Goodman and served as a Breaking Bad prequel, with some even preferring it to the original show.
In between her latest project and Saul, Seehorn made a movie with comic Jim Gaffigan, which also brought together elements of comedy and sci-fi called Linoleum, about an astronomer who wants to go to space and one day has a car drop out of the sky containing a man who looks just like him.
In describing that movie, Seehorn referenced her own favourite films of all time, all three of which are examples of directors refusing to stick rigidly to genre and leaving some events open to interpretation.
She told Inverse: “I think it squarely lands in that world of magical realism to aid and abet storytelling that involves really intangible things, like unconditional love, time, linear time, reality, and your reality versus the reality others have. It’s like my favorite films: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lars and the Real Girl, or The Lobster. I love that allegorical kind of element to storytelling.”
The three respective directors of those films are Michel Gondry, Craig Gillespie and Yorgos Lanthimos, who currently has a new movie out featuring Emma Stone called Bugonia, another example of a surreal lens shone on our everyday lives in which everything feels like it might be just imagined, but you are never sure.
Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine, meanwhile, is undoubtedly one of the finest films ever made, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet giving career-best performances in the 2004 sci-fi romance that allowed the former music video director Gondry the budget to explore the boundaries of his imagination. Lars and the Real Girl, however, was not well received on release in 2007 but has slowly been reappraised, Gillespie pacing things perfectly to allow the audience to understand Ryan Gosling’s character falling for a sex doll.
So far, Pluribus has been a ratings success for Seehorn and Gilligan, meanwhile, with a maximum score on Rotten Tomatoes and episodes continuing to be released through until Boxing Day.
Seehorn is also working on a thriller called Eleven Days about a Texan prison warden facing off against a drug dealer in a 1970s jail, and another called Sender alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and Severance’s Britt Lower, the plot of which is yet to be revealed.
