Vince Gilligan and the Pluribus cast talk sci-fi, sugar highs and secret scripts

Breaking Bad is a show that didn’t just break bad, it broke the internet – and most of 21st-century pop culture along with it. Good luck finding a more influential TV show this side of the millennium.

Vince Gilligan, the creator, showrunner and brainiac behind the award-winning, meth-making drama and its equally acclaimed sequel series Better Call Saul, is playing with our emotions once again with his latest small-screen bonanza Pluribus (airing weekly on Apple TV).

Pluribus — Official Trailer | Apple TV - YouTube

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The first season follows Carol, one of only 13 people on Earth uninfected by a virus which has subsumed the rest of humanity into a seemingly blissful hive mind state. Pluribus (from the Latin e pluribus unum, meaning ‘out of many, one’) returns to Albuquerque and stars Gilligan’s ‘too good to let go’ Rhea Seehorn, whose starring role as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul earned her multiple Primetime Emmy and Screen Actors’ Guild Award nominations.

Gilligan conceived of the show’s idea while filming Better Call Saul, but it’s taken some years for it to hit our screens as “it takes [him] a while to come up with these things.” We caught up with Gilligan, Seehorn and her co-star, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actress Karolina Wydra. Here are five things we learnt.

Gilligan owes his career to The X Files

Before he was making some of the best TV on TV, Gilligan cut his entertainment-making teeth on one of the best shows of the ‘90s – The X-Files, producing and writing numerous episodes across its 11-season run. Did it influence his desire to pen a sci-fi script post Better Call Saul? Kind of.

“X-Files was a film school I got paid to attend for seven years,” he shared. “It was a wonderful, wonderful job, and I learned basic television story construction and production. I'm so grateful for the experiences and knowledge I got from my time on The X Files.”

“I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for that job because I wouldn't know how to do this job. I got to work on a great many episodes of The X Files, honing my science fiction writing skills.” Who knew we’d have Mulder and Scully to thank for Breaking Bad?

Reading the Pluribus script was nerve-wracking for Rhea Seehorn

While immersed in her character for Better Call Saul, Seehorn knew Gilligan was working on another script specifically for her in the background, but she wasn’t allowed to see it.

“It was nerve-wracking!” she recalled of wondering what her next project would be. “I got so excited when he said that he’d written something for me; I knew whatever it was, it was going to be great.”

Accepting a mystery role was a no-brainer for Seehorn – she’d say yes to the project, whatever it turned out to be. Gilligan teased that it would have a sci-fi element, but wouldn’t reveal much else.

“He didn't want to pitch the story,” Seehorn explained. “He said, ‘I just want to wait and send you the script, but I'm still working on it’. So that waiting period was a little pins and needles; I just couldn't wait to read it.”

Wydra is fed up of “always playing the bad guy”

It doesn’t seem to matter how photogenic you are; in Hollywood, you can still be pigeon-holed. Karolina Wydra, who plays Kosia, a human infected with the RNA virus and Carol’s ‘chaperone’, reckons she’s carved a (somewhat unwanted) niche for playing bad guys, something she was happy to change in Pluribus.

“I'm always playing the bad guy. Even in True Blood, I was the vampire that just takes over,” Wydra shared. “[My characters are] always very intense, very powerful. Their intentions aren’t always the best –
they like taking over the world. I don't know why I always get cast as a villain, or – and I hate the term – the femme fatale.”

“So to play this character, it was just so fun to step into the world of someone so serene and blissful – someone unflappable who can just hold space.”

Gilligan doesn’t like shooting big scenes

Though Pluribus more than maintains Gilligan’s signature style of slow-burning episodes with sharp-focused close-ups and super long shots, there’s some fun scale here, too. One of his favourite scenes to create was when one of the uninfected members turns up to meet the other ‘survivors’ in Air Force One.

“I was nervous about directing it because I love directing, but I don't love big scenes,” he explained. “I don't like scenes with lots of actors; they're overwhelming to block and figure out. You have to shoot them over and over and over again with all these cameras. But the Air Force One scene and the San Sebastian dinner scene were both a pleasure for me, because the actors were so wonderful.”

Gilligan thinks having two ‘smoking hot’ leading ladies was ‘a cherry on top’ for the show

Gilligan was sure Wydra’s frequent femme fatale casting was because she’s, in his words, ‘smoking hot’. “You’re both smoking hot”, he clarified of his two female leads. “That's a nice cherry on top of the talent,” he said.

It certainly seems like a bonus considering Gilligan initially envisioned his protagonist as a man. “I thought to myself, ‘I'm working with this wonderful actress, Rhea Seehorn, and I love her so much, so why don't I write this show about a female protagonist?’, which is not typically my wheelhouse, but I thought someone else is going to snatch her up after Better Call Saul. So it worked out for me.”

Sandy Pony Donuts were the cast and crew’s treat

We’ve heard it before: catering can make or break the on-set morale. Luckily, the Pluribus team seemed able to indulge frequent sugar highs thanks to an abundance of doughnuts from supplier Sandy Pony Donuts.

“I never eat doughnuts, but that was like, our thing,” Wydra recalled. “It wasn’t until like two-thirds through all of the episodes that I realised why there were doughnuts on set every day: they were from the company that supplied the show. I was just like: ‘I love that this show has doughnuts!” 
 


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