A shocking global event changes the lives of everyone on our planet in executive producer Vince Gilligan‘s long-awaited sci-fi drama, Pluribus. Set in Albuquerque like his hits Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, the eerie story reunites him with the latter’s Rhea Seehorn. She plays Carol Sturka, described by Gilligan as “the most miserable person in the world who decides she needs to save Earth from happiness.”
If that seems mysterious and upside down, it’s by design. “We want to keep a lot of it secret, and we tried to hit every [sci-fi] trope and turn it on its ear,” says Gilligan, who drew inspiration from the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the classic TV series The Twilight Zone. Fun fact: Seehorn’s character’s name is an homage to a character played by Fritz Weaver in The Twilight Zone episode “Third From the Sun” (cue sleuthing for possible Pluribus plotline clues!) and Better Call Saul guest star Carol Burnett.
Carol Sturka herself is an unexpected combination. “She’s a romance novelist and a curmudgeon,” Gilligan reveals of the grumpy woman we first meet on a book tour with her manager Helen (Miriam Shor, once again playing a literary world character as she did on Younger). “The two of them together on set were a hoot. They were thickest thieves from the moment they met, and the chemistry was wonderful,” Gilligan says.
Chemistry with Seehorn was key for casting because Gilligan wrote the role for her. He began working on the story 10 years ago, and centered it on a male protagonist, but that changed after he worked with Seehorn on Better Call Saul. “Rhea is a lot of ways very much the opposite of Carol, sweet and kind to everybody, which again proves what a good actor she is,” he shares. “I wanted to work with her again, and she’s tremendous in it.”
Gilligan has a caution for anyone constructing theories that because this series is set in Albuquerque, there will be a secret connection to the Saul universe: “I’m sure maybe a lot of folks are going to say, ‘There’s got to be some deeper secret point to that. She’s really Kim Wexler,’ or whatnot. She’s not. I love Albuquerque. I love my crew, I love the people. I love the landscape. It looks fantastic on film.” That said, “There might be some Easter eggs along the way, [but] I can’t imagine Carol running into Kim Wexler. That would be pretty weird.”
Well, it’s a weird show, in a wonderful way. And it gets even weirder when Carol meets Zosia (Karolina Wydra), a spokesperson for the believers in our planet’s new reality. “Carol does not want to be tasked with saving the world, but no one else is rising to the occasion. She goes on a quest to the other side of the world trying to save it from a crisis that in her mind is apocalyptic,” Gilligan says. “But perhaps it’s not as bad as she thinks. We leave that to the audience: Is this dystopic or utopic?”
Pluribus, Series Premiere, Friday, November 7, Apple TV+
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