RHEA SEEHORN IS GETTING AWAY WITH IT ~ NYT

The jig is up for Kim Wexler as “Better Call Saul” nears a close. Meanwhile, the actress who plays her has been quietly stealing the show.

By Austin Considine

July 8, 2022

LOS ANGELES — Rhea Seehorn insists she is a rule follower. And not the kind who, like her character Kim Wexler on AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” follows some rules in public while bending others in secret to whatever ends she believes are just.

She never sneaks a grape from the salad bar. She stands on the foot-shaped stickers at the airport to ensure proper social distance. She becomes enraged when someone cuts in line.

“I have an issue with people thinking they’re better than anyone else,” Seehorn said over coffee and eggs at a Beverly Hills cafe, one of two times we met around the Los Angeles area last month. “It makes my blood boil in a way that I think is a bit irrational.”

This made for a fine line, I suggested, between her and her character, a lawyer who faces dire consequences for her increasingly Machiavellian machinations when “Saul” returns for its final run on Monday. Kim has that reaction toward people who flout the social contract, too. Seehorn acknowledged as much, but there was an important distinction, she said.

“The problem is, Kim’s ideals aren’t off,” she said. “But the way she’s going about them is.”

Across five and a half seasons, Kim’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series. It wasn’t always that way. When it began, “Saul,” a prequel to “Breaking Bad,” seemed primarily focused on the transformation of the slippery but fundamentally decent Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) into Albuquerque’s sleaziest lawyer, Saul Goodman. Kim’s ultimate role was uncertain then, even to the writers.

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