The most embarrassing audition of Rhea Seehorn’s career: “I took such big risks”
Some TV actors are lucky enough to become renowned for their performances in one great show, with a character that everyone will always know them for. Think James Gandolfini in The Sopranos, Michael C Hall in Dexter, or Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City. But Rhea Seehorn now has two, and a Golden Globe award to go with them.
This week saw Seehorn pick up the award for ‘Best Actress’ in a TV drama for Pluribus, the hit Apple TV show that has minds almost as bent as when they gave us the equally brilliant Severance, and it sees her team up once again with Vince Gilligan, the man who cast her in her other big role on Better Call Saul.
That was the Breaking Bad spin-off that became legend in its own right, doing what seemed impossible and becoming almost as well-loved and critically acclaimed as the Walter White behemoth, with Seehorn again winning countless awards for her performances as Kim Wexler, love interest of Saul Goodman himself and long-suffering lawyer.
Better Call Saul was such a hit that it ran for six seasons, one more than Breaking Bad, and picked up the most Emmy nominations in TV history. Seehorn was such a revelation in the show that many wondered how she might possibly follow it. The answer was to follow Breaking Bad’s mastermind Gilligan in making Pluribus, the show about a woman who finds herself one of only 13 people in the world unaffected by an alien virus.
Seehorn’s path to becoming Gilligan’s actor of choice wasn’t an easy one, however; she spent ten years having to audition for various roles without success while taking smaller parts in TV shows and lower-budget films, and had actually been in acting for almost a decade before that without breaking through.
She told Backstage about some of her worst audition stories, recalling: “I had one where I found the character funny in this very offbeat way. It was fun for me to spin the lines, it was like she had other rules in her head that nobody else knew, so she had her own set of jokes she found amusing. I did the jokes they wrote, but I spun them as a person who was quite odd, and they didn’t enjoy that. And they let me know they didn’t enjoy it.”
Steeled by years of not landing the parts she was after, Seehorn was undeterred and would take parts in the meantime on pilots like The Thick of It as well as voice-over work for animations like American Dad.
She added, “I drove home thinking it was OK, because if I had had to do what I think they wanted, I wouldn’t have been the right person. I took such big risks on one that they actually thought I was ill or maybe had taken cold medicine, but they were all character choices. That was embarrassing. I was fine, but I took character choices that clearly didn’t go well.”
Things have changed in a big way for Seehorn in the last ten years though and Pluribus will come back for a second season, albeit not for a while with Gilligan saying: “We’re working on it…I would love to go faster if I could.”
In the meantime, she will be seen in two films, one called Eleven Days with Jason Isaacs about a hostage crisis in a Texas prison in 1974, and Sender, which co-stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Severance’s Britt Lower.
