Seehorn

The last time I ate at McDonald’s was also the first time I tried a McGriddle.

Why am I thinking about a breakfast sandwich? Well, it’s morning, for starters. And my old friend Laurie Ochoa, who runs all things food at The Times, just had her own first encounter with a McGriddle, inspired by the item’s mention in the most recent season of “The Bear.”

Should McDonald’s have a Michelin star? “The Bear’s” pastry chef Luca thinks so. Laurie is a fan too. Me? Honestly, I ordered it by accident, hangry and delusional after driving too many miles on a road trip home. To this day, whenever my son, Sean, passes that Lost Hills McDonald’s, he snaps a picture and sends it to me, captioning it: “McGriddle?”

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Does Rhea Seehorn dig McGriddles? She loves bread, so maybe the whole pancake-bun thing would put her off.

Cover story: Rhea Seehorn

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

If you love great television, you know Seehorn from “Better Call Saul” and the new Apple TV series “Pluribus,” where she plays Carol, a sad woman forced to save the world from happiness and the hive mind.

But other than those two classics and a guest turn on the final season of “Veep,” I have not Seehorn in anything else. Which wasn’t for a lack of trying on her part, as I learned from talking with her for a recent Envelope cover story.

Seehorn moved to Los Angeles in 2003 after landing a lead role on the ABC sitcom “I’m With Her.” Seehorn played … well, I’ll let her describe the character.

“I was the naysaying, coattail-riding, bitchy, alcoholic little sister of Teri Polo’s character,” Seehorn says, laughing. “It was so much fun.”

The comedy ran for 23 episodes and was then summarily canceled, despite the season finale drawing about 11 million viewers. (“Can you imagine?” Seehorn says of the ratings. “You’d be a juggernaut now.”)

When she arrived in L.A., ABC put her up at the massive Oakwood apartment complex on Barham Boulevard, an (in)famous landing place for child actors, musicians and newcomers like Seehorn getting their start in Hollywood. On her way to work each day — she walked to the Warner Bros. lot because she didn’t have a car — Seehorn would pass older men wearing short bathrobes at 7 in the morning and “momagers” hustling their kids to an audition.

Says Seehorn: “It’s weird because you’ve landed a great job and you’re working, so, ‘Yay!’ But also, you’re staying in a one-room apartment that has a kitchenette and a Murphy bed that folds into the wall. When the bed’s folded down, it touches the couch and you can’t walk around. But when the bed is up, it’s a mirror, so you watch yourself have no friends, sitting there watching TV, eating a TV dinner. Then you’re like, is it less depressing to just sit in a bed all day, or should I watch myself sitting here?”

Needless to say, Seehorn moved as soon possible, landing in a fourplex apartment across from the Warner Bros. lot near the Taco Bell and Don Cuco on Riverside Drive. It was heaven. It had a second bedroom. And a window!

She lived there until the second season of “Better Call Saul.”

“The good news is, when you move to L.A. from New York, everything seems like a mansion,” Seehorn says, laughing.

Sitting on that Murphy bed at the Oakwood, was there ever a time when Seehorn wondered, “What am I doing?”

“I had come from supposedly being the receptionist at a construction office in Brooklyn, but what I was really doing was cleaning their bathrooms with like nine pairs of rubber gloves on because it was so disgusting,” Seehorn says. “That was my day job, and then I was working at Playwrights Horizons, a wonderful theater that I’d always wanted to work at, so I was thrilled. But theater doesn’t pay enough to live on. So life was always cobbling something together to pursue my passion, my dream.”

Read more of our ‘Pluribus’ coverage

Rhea Seehorn possesses what Vince Gilligan calls “Jumbotron face.” As the creator of “Pluribus” and (with Peter Gould) “Better Call Saul,” Gilligan has relied on Seehorn’s ability to broadcast what her characters are thinking and feeling without saying much of anything. Gilligan loves silences and uses them in long stretches, allowing — or, perhaps more accurately, demanding — his audience to figure out what’s happening on their own.

And in Seehorn he found someone who, with a mere sidelong glance or knitted brow, can let you in on Gilligan’s secrets.

But Seehorn carries this ability wherever she goes, she tells me. People take a look at her and make assumptions. She’s 5 foot 4, lean and seems athletic, though she says she’s “the least athletic person that anybody knows.” That hasn’t stopped her from being cast as a golf instructor in the upcoming second season of the Owen Wilson comedy series “Stick” and a track and field coach in a movie she’s shooting right now called “Running.”

“I do not run,” she told the movie’s director, Gavin O’Connor. “I can tell people to run, but you don’t want to see me running.”

It’s not just work, though, where these deductions are made. Up until a few years ago, when people started recognizing her for playing poker-faced attorney Kim Wexler on “Better Call Saul,” Seehorn would be standing in a store and customers figured she worked there. Shopping at the Gap, she’d be asked if a T-shirt comes in medium. In Target, she’d be queried about where to find the Christmas decorations. Even on set, a background person would approach her, wondering if there’s any more plain bagels at craft service.

Why do you think this happens? I ask her. Because, even with her fame and her Golden Globe win for playing Carol, a sad woman forced to save the world from happiness and the hive mind in “Pluribus,” Seehorn, 54, says this still takes place on a regular basis.

“I’ve asked my friends, and apparently my daydreaming or thinking face looks focused,” she says. “I guess my interior monologue is highly interpretable to people, and if you’re standing in a store and you see somebody really thinking and thinking, they’re like, ‘She must be restocking the shelves.’ When in reality, I’m probably thinking about what I said wrong to somebody at a party in the ’80s.”

Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka in “Pluribus.”

(Apple TV)

Seehorn bursts out laughing, which she does often and with great gusto throughout our conversation. We’re at The Times, nine years after her last visit to our offices, which I know because she shows me a photo on her camera roll of her youngest stepson, McLain, taken when we were downtown and he was 9, young enough to still be thrilled about being in a “newspaper building.”

This prompts another take-your-kids-to-work memory.

“I brought him and Gray [the other stepson she shares with her partner of 12 years, real estate agent Graham Larson] to the set of ‘Better Call Saul’ when they were 7 and 9, and the thing they were most excited about was signing an NDA,” Seehorn says. “Everybody in the production office made a huge deal of it, pretending like they were spies, because I knew they’d think that was cool.”

Seehorn played Kim opposite Bob Odenkirk on “Better Call Saul” for six seasons, creating a character that evolved from a minor role to what Gilligan calls the “backbone of the series.” Dazzled by her versatility, Gilligan wrote “Pluribus” for Seehorn. But he didn’t want to tell her about it until he had a script and not just an outline. He asked “Saul” executive producer Melissa Bernstein to act as a spy and tell him if Seehorn was close to taking another job. One day, during the show’s final season, Bernstein told him he’d better pounce.

“I didn’t want to miss my opportunity,” Gilligan says over the phone. “That would have been a bummer. Rhea is the manager that makes the show work.”

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

Where Kim Wexler was a composed and poised overachiever, suppressing her emotions when things (as they often did) spiraled out of control, “Pluribus’” Carol Sturka lets it all hang out. She’s volatile and angry, drinking heavily to obliterate her regret and rage. The characters share a fierce drive to fight for what they believe is right, which, for Carol, means maintaining her autonomy and resisting the good-vibes group contentment of the Others. A hero has never been more reluctant than this curmudgeon.

Seehorn is the ultimate professional: pleasant, quick to credit her colleagues, a team player. So Carol’s bitter fury feels distinct from her friendly personality as well as anything we’ve ever seen her do onscreen. But it’s not entirely foreign. Talking about the “Pluribus” season finale, she said that while she’s never murdered anyone, she has felt out-of-control rage.

When did this happen?

“I’m not going to tell you that!” she answers, laughing.

I’m just trying to picture it, I tell her.

“I know, because a lot of people are like, ‘I’ve never seen you mad,’” Seehorn says. “I suppress. I suppress too much. That’s something I work on with my therapist. I used to scream and yell as a teenager. That’s how I fought. And I just decided in college one day — I think I had an out-of-body experience — that I don’t want to be this person. And it probably moved the needle too far the other way. Now, when I’m angry, often I withdraw and get very quiet. I say everything is fine and then I’m never speaking to you again.”

That could have made playing a highly reactive character like Carol therapeutic. Instead, it did a number on Seehorn’s body.

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

“Unlike Carol, I cry often when I’m extremely angry and in the middle of trying to tell someone how upset I am,” Seehorn says. “Like the anger disturbs my body so much that it makes me cry. No matter how much I tried to unplug from Carol, my body didn’t understand that I was pretending.”

We start talking about relationships and unhealthy withdrawal and letting things fester to the point that when the emotions come out, it feels abrupt and the other person has no idea what’s going on. And out of nowhere, Seehorn gives me a taste of Carol, growling the words, “Can you just get it?” with such ferocity that I’m almost physically blown back in my chair.

“God, you scared me with that,” I tell her.

“Thank you,” Seehorn says, beaming.

Because she’s a (generally) well-adjusted human being, Seehorn has developed ways of dealing with the terror and flop sweat that comes with playing the lead on an expensive, highly touted TV series, one that earned 18 Emmy nominations, including one for her lead turn. She converted the garage at her home into what sounds like a veritable wonderland. In one corner, there’s a tiny gym. There’s a place to record voice-over work, not a proper booth, which she’d like someday, but close. There’s a space to be quiet and read scripts. There’s an area where she can paint, sculpt, do jigsaw puzzles, Lego sets, embroider — all the things that ease her anxiety but also help her work through creative blocks.

“If I have too much of a vice grip on a scene and I can’t figure it out, I’ll do a jigsaw puzzle or draw while running the lines,” Seehorn says.

She loves creating things, but she also loves projects that involve following instructions. That soothes her. In the middle of enthusing about a cross-stitch embroidery project, she says, “Don’t roll your eyes at me!” Which I most definitely was not doing. That was my daydreaming, thinking face.

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

Sometimes these projects make their way inside the house, where Seehorn might turn on the television and watch what she calls “murder TV,” sitting under a big, curved metal dome lamp that feels like an interrogation spotlight. There, her brain still working on what she was doing in her office, she’ll lose herself on multiple fronts as she wrestles with a scene.

Seehorn loves watching shows like “Dateline” because they provide a sense of order in a chaotic world. Bad guy. Bad guy gets caught. Bad guy goes to jail. All is well. But it goes beyond that. As an actor, she loves watching people trying to lie — and failing. She can’t believe how bad people are at not telling the truth.

“Every single time, I’m like, ‘Dude’s lying,’” Seehorn says. “Women too, where I’m watching an interrogation scene and thinking, ‘There’s a zero percent chance you did not know someone was going to break in and shoot your husband.’ It’s funny because as actors, whenever we’re playing criminals that are lying to the police, we’re really good at it.”

Does that mean Seehorn is an adept liar? Yes and no. You’ve seen her act. She can make you believe anything. But when she does lie, she is compelled to confess, even when the fib is innocuous.

“I’ll be in a conversation where there’s a bunch of cool people talking about a movie they saw, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, that was great!’” Seehorn says. “And then I’ll leave and then I’ll come back and say, ‘I didn’t actually see it. I’m sorry.’ And they’re like, ‘Who’s that weird girl?’ I’m good at lying, but bad at holding the guilt.”

So when you’re telling me you don’t know any details about the second season of “Pluribus,” are you misleading me? I ask.

“I know nothing!” Seehorn says. The atomic bomb in the crate that a helicopter carefully deposits in Carol’s driveway in the last scene? “As soon as they said, ‘Cut,’ I went up to Vince and asked, ‘Now can you tell me what we’re doing?’ And he said, ‘I have no idea.’”

“And all these months later, I know no more than that,” she continues.

But if you did…

“You’d be getting a phone call from me about an hour after we say goodbye, confessing all,” Seehorn answers, smiling.

The phone still hasn’t rung.

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

Rhea Seehorn was nervous about whether “Pluribus” would be recognized by Emmy voters Wednesday when nominations were announced. So she was jubilant when she and the surreal sci-series on Apple TV scored 18 nominations, the most for a first-year drama.

“I’m just so grateful,” the actor said in a phone interview. “People were like, ‘Why were you nervous?’ Honestly, you never actually know. I’m just so thrilled for the show, my co-stars, the production design, the editing, the writing, the music, the sound. I haven’t moved from my couch since they first announced everything because I’m still trying to call everybody on the show.”

Seehorn received a nomination for lead actress in a drama series for her portrayal of cynical Carol Sturka, a fantasy romance author who finds herself in a mystifying situation after a virus seems to have wiped out most of Earth’s population. The series was created by Vince Gilligan, who created the acclaimed series “Breaking Bad” and co-created its spinoff “Better Call Saul,” which also featured Seehorn.

The actor compared her experience of being nominated for “Pluribus” to “Better Call Saul,” which earned her two supporting actress nominations: “ ‘Better Call Saul’ was such a family that supported and cheered each other on, and I’m so grateful I have that environment again. People could not be happier for each other, and we get to celebrate the show together.”

She added, “The only part that feels different is that it’s my first nomination as a lead. It’s the process of Vince writing this for me and seeing the mountain which he wanted me to climb and going through that process. The whole thing has been its own journey, so ending up with awards and nominations, and being so well received by critics and fans is not lost on me.”

The series has been applauded for its mix of drama, comedy and strangeness in its portrait of a woman coming to terms to what seems like an impossible dilemma.

“I love the storytelling, how much Vince and I would drill down on making this as authentic as we could in terms of an everyman who has to deal with an insane situation,” Seehorn said. “Most of us are just not heroic or leaping off the couch to go save the world. And Carol is dealing with immense grief and confusion in an utter dystopian crisis. I love the humor and the drama that comes out of us being as realistic as we can with her amidst an unrealistic event.”

Fans of “Pluribus” have been relentlessly curious since the finale in December about when the second season will launch.

“I don’t know anything about that,” Seehorn said. “I don’t have to keep secrets because I’m not great at keeping them, and I know nothing. I don’t know what I’m doing with an atom bomb in the driveway. I can’t wait to find out. The writers want to have the same quality and reward the intelligence of the fans and never phone a single thing in. So their process is their process.”