Rhea Seehorn (‘Better Call Saul’): ‘It’s incredibly painful to leave him; there’s still love there’

“It’s thoughtful and it’s as intelligent and nuanced as those two characters are,” reflects Rhea Seehorn about the ending of “Better Call Saul” playing Kim opposite Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). For our recent webchat, she also says, “It’s incredibly painful to leave him, but I think she thinks they have a future. They have decided to unburden themselves and free their conscience. I’m a hopeless romantic, so I think she’s gonna try and start figuring out how to reduce his sentence, but legally, not with a scam.”

“Better Call Saul” closed out its seven-season run of the AMC series that tracked Jimmy becoming the ‘criminal’ lawyer Saul Goodman from “Breaking Bad.” The drama also showed the endearing and dangerous romance between Jimmy and Kim, a relationship that had become the heart of the show. The final season saw tragedy trigger their break-up and then explored their lives after the “Breaking Bad” timeline in black and white.

At the end of the series, Kim visits Jimmy in prison where they share a cigarette. The quiet scene harkened back to the first scene the couple shared in the pilot episode. Seehorn explains, “Bob and I innately trusted each other as scene partners from day one. To know each other that much more by the end, there was a lot of weight in saying, ‘Hi Jimmy.’ It’s Kim saying, ‘I see you and I know you see me.’ Which is the profound connection that they always had. There’s still love there, there’s pain, there’s tragedy. It’s hello and it’s goodbye to a chapter of their lives. I was playing that scene on the very last day, with the weight of that, going, ‘holy shit, what we’ve been through Bob, for the last seven years, and here we are.’ It was all there. It was nice to be able to draw upon it. But you had to limit it. It’s not supposed to be Rhea just crying.”

Odenkirk suffered a heart attack during the final season of the show. which led to a pause on production. Seehorn reveals, “We had some weeks to personally grab him, hug him, cry and tell him how much we love him. And if he ever does this again we’re gonna kill him. By the time we got back to the work, it was weird. But it was the joy that we get to do this. We were always grateful. Now we’re really, really, grateful!”

Currently, Seehorn is trying to decide to submit herself in the lead or supporting category for the Emmy Awards. She admits, “it’s not as much about how I can orchestrate a plan to get the result that I want. There’s a strong argument to be made either way. They are champagne problems to have.” She was nominated in 2022 as Drama Supporting Actress.

On playing Kim, the actress says, “There were a lot of challenges. I do not say that pejoratively. I say that blissfully. You are flattered when somebody trusts you with difficult material. Especially material where you are needing to play things that are not being verbalized. There needs to be clarity with nuance. Because humans are messy.”