‘Pluribus’ Boss Gordon Smith Explains How That Sneaky ‘Better Call Saul’ Cameo Transpired

[This story contains spoilers from Pluribus season one, episode five, “Got Milk.”]

Matters have escalated since The Hollywood Reporter last caught up with Pluribus writer-director/executive producer Gordon Smith a couple weeks ago.

In Smith’s third episode, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) mishandled a live hand grenade, prompting her liaison, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), to quickly dispose of it and shield Carol from the nearby blast. Zosia ended up in the hospital for her injuries, but she and the rest of the Joined still gave Carol the benefit of the doubt after Zosia’s then-total of three near-death experiences. Their hive mind was even willing to supply Carol with an atom bomb or a bazooka — despite the grenade mishap and two emotional outbursts that killed millions of other Joined people around the world.

Realizing that the collective will grant just about any wish and never tell a lie, Carol pushes the envelope in episode four, “Please, Carol.” She drugs a still-recovering Zosia with sodium thiopental, hoping its truth serum-type properties will compel Zosia to reveal how to undo the Joining. Instead, Zosia and the Joined fall into a state of mass distress, resulting in Zosia’s own cardiac arrest and fourth brush with death at the hands of Carol. (The woman who revived Zosia with an AED is former Better Call Saul healthy and safety supervisor, Rosa Estrada. She brought Bob Odenkirk back after his cardiac incident on Saul’s final season.)

Returning in short order, Smith directed this week’s Ariel Levine-written fifth episode, “Got Milk,” marking the first time he’s helmed a script he didn’t write himself. The Michigander was tasked with illustrating the fallout of Carol’s dangerous scheme to save the human race. That meant depicting the Joined’s mass exodus from Albuquerque with an ambitious panoramic shot of taillights on ABQ’s freeway system. And instead of a live concierge to answer her requests by phone, Carol is now greeted with an automated voice recording. She’s still able to ask for anything she needs, but the familiar voice also adds, “Our feelings for you haven’t changed, Carol. But after everything that’s happened, we just need a little space.”

If the sound of the Joined’s voicemail greeter sounds like Better Call Saul star Patrick Fabian, your ears do not deceive you. It’s a fitting choice in a couple ways. Firstly, Fabian has a knack for sugarcoating unwelcome news. And considering that Carol is now the most despised person on Earth, it makes sense for the Saul brain trust to cast the actor behind Howard Hamlin, who at one point was the most detested character on Better Call Saul.

“We said, ‘You know who would be perfect? Patrick.’ He didn’t really know what he was recording,” Smith tells THR. “As a person and actor, Patrick has a darkness within him, but he has done a lot of work to present and understand the positive in life. We captured dozens of versions, any one of which would have been perfect.”

Smith and the rest of the Pluribus crew recorded the greeting ahead of filming Carol’s introduction to it, so they decided to play a game with Seehorn on the day. They wanted to see if she would break character upon hearing the sound of her friend and former housemate during Saul. (Seehorn and Fabian shared a rental with Odenkirk throughout most of the series; Seehorn, along with her Saul hair stylist Trish Almeida, re-rented the place for Pluribus.)

“We didn’t give [Seehorn] the heads up. We wanted to see what she would do and if she would break,” Smith admits. “But, of course, she’s too good. She did the scene [without being fazed], and when we yelled ‘cut,’ she was like, ‘Was that Patrick!? Excuse me, nobody said that was going to be Patrick.’ Her reaction was very funny.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Smith also discusses how Carol’s morally questionable behavior challenges the traditional definition of a hero, before addressing episode five’s ghastly cliffhanger. 

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Episode five is the first time you’ve directed a script you didn’t write. In this case, it belongs to Emmy collector Ariel Levine. Did you step in because someone else’s availability changed?

Yes, essentially. We had a turbulent schedule. We were anticipating starting shooting in June or July of 2023, and we obviously didn’t because the strikes hit. They hit when we were maybe a month and a half away from finishing the breaking of the season. We had directors on the line who we wanted to work with, and when we emerged from the strikes, people’s schedules just continued to move. Some people had personal or health issues and all sorts of things that would shake up a schedule. So I offered that I would be willing to do another one, and in the absence of a better choice, they said okay.

We previously discussed why the Joined would give their kryptonite, Carol, even more weapons to potentially harm them. But you couldn’t say at the time of episode three that they’d soon be getting out of Dodge after Carol nearly killed Zosia for the fourth time. How do you square the drugging of Zosia with the notion that Carol is a hero? 

Being a hero doesn’t necessarily mean always doing something nice. The trick of the modern world is that everybody thinks they’re a hero even when they’re at their worst behavior. But in this case, Carol really thinks this is the right thing to do. She believes this loss of individuality is bad, and I can’t say she’s wrong. I know that’s what she thinks. The people involved in the Joining didn’t get a choice, and anything you don’t get a choice in is going to be morally questionable. I think Carol is on pretty stable moral ground to try to do something.

She is very careful about it. She doses herself. She tests as best she can for a layman. She’s already determined that they must tell the truth. Even if it feels like something a normal person would lie about. But she didn’t realize how much her forcing the issue would put Zosia in a state of distress. It was going to put all of them not just in harm’s way, psychologically, but physically, too. It’s so bad for them that it causes a physical meltdown.

If they said, “Hey, can we work on Zosia?” and Carol said no, that’s when we would head into territory where I would be less likely to call her a hero. She did some bad things. She pushed things unknowingly, but how could she know this was going to be the outcome? 

She wants to be a hero. She writes these heroic romance novels that include the romantic notion of the hero, but she’s not really well-equipped to know what that is. She keeps asking other Old-Schoolers to figure this out together, but nobody takes her up on it. So it’s up to her, and she’s up against 7 billion people. She doesn’t quite know what the next steps are, and she’s constantly experimenting. So episode five is her feeling bad this happened, but she has to keep moving. What can she learn from the footprints of 7 billion other people? She tries to play detective as best she can.

In episode four, the woman who rushes in to revive Zosia with an AED is actually Better Call Saul’s former health and safety supervisor, Rosa Estrada. She helped bring Bob Odenkirk back to life on the set of the final season. Overall, how much did Bob’s cardiac incident influence Zosia’s cardiac arrest at the end of episode four? 

Not at all. I’m not saying it was never mentioned in advance, but we in no way aimed towards it for effect. I’m not even sure what the effect would be, or for whom. We included Rosa because she knew exactly the proper procedure for the scene, and she was the tech we consulted in preparing for it. She’s done some acting, too. [Writer’s Note: Estrada appeared as a doctor on season three of Breaking Bad.]

Better Call Saul’s Patrick “P-Fab” Fabian cameos as the automatic voicemail greeting Carol receives whenever she calls the Joined now. How did Patrick’s auditory and uncredited return come to be?

We said, “You know who would be perfect? Patrick.” So we asked, and he said yes. He didn’t really know what he was recording. I was on the Zoom session with him, and I just talked to him through what the emotional register should be. He’s such a lovely human being. In a certain way, he’s the perfect guy for this. As a person and actor, Patrick has a darkness within him, for sure, but he has done a lot of work to present and understand the positive in life. During the session, it was like, “Hey, let’s try one that’s a little less crazy upbeat and more casual and easy.” We captured dozens of versions, any one of which would have been perfect. But I did love this one.

When we were shooting the [introductory] scene, it was fun to see Rhea discover it was Patrick in the moment. We didn’t give her the heads up. We wanted to see what she would do and if she would break. But, of course, she’s too good. She did the scene [without being fazed], and when we yelled ‘cut,’ she was like, “Was that Patrick!? Excuse me, nobody said that was going to be Patrick.” Her reaction was very funny.

In your Saul episode, “Rico,” the glass partition in HHM’s mailroom was, at one point, that show’s most expensive VFX shot to date. Where does the Joined fleeing Albuquerque rank among the most ambitious VFX shots you guys have ever done?

It’s one of the big ones. There’s a bunch of shots in episodes one and two that I’m pretty sure are bigger. I’m pretty sure we have some bigger ones coming up later in the season. But this particular shot was quite intense. It’s actually two shots. First, we shot Rhea on stage, on a set we built to match the actual rooftop where we shot the 270-degree pan. And the pan needed to be shot at a precise time of day to be able to see the right amount of taillights, even though they would mostly be added in post. Then we have a wide drone shot of the hotel that also needed to be shot in that sunset-y window of time, and we did a matching drone shot of Rhea on the backlot. It just wasn’t safe to put her up there on the hotel roof, so those two shots required a lot of planning, in addition to VFX of the cars departing. So you’re totally not wrong that it’s a megillah, but I don’t know that it’s the biggest.

Besides tourist prevention, episodes three and five both demonstrate why you built Carol’s cul-de-sac from scratch. In episode five, you fly drones, you unleash savage wolf-dogs and you drive a cop car through a fence. You must’ve been relieved to not have to worry about sleeping neighbors during those night shoots. 

Absolutely. I don’t think we could have done the show without building Carol’s cul-de-sac, certainly not as we scripted it. We knew fairly early on we were going to build the cul-de-sac, and it allowed us to imagine and play in the scenes in a way that’s next to impossible to do in a real neighborhood with real people. You’d drive everybody nuts. We couldn’t accomplish most of these sequences in one night. Most of them were several night endeavors. A real neighborhood full of people would be less solicitous, as they should be, when you come back for a second or third night. 

We want to be good neighbors to the people of Albuquerque. There’s always a dread when you see a film crew descending on your street. I have that dread, and I work in the business. You want to minimize the dread and be respectful to the people around you. And given the scale of what we were trying to do, this was the only way to be respectful to the people around us. If we had to find a real house for Carol’s house, many of the set pieces would’ve been completely different.

Characters love using camcorders on Vince Gilligan shows. Carol is now making self-tapes for the other Old-Schoolers in order to share her scientific findings about the Joined. And having gone too far in one instance, she deletes her first take. She shows the self-awareness of someone who doesn’t actually revel in being the “most miserable person on Earth.”

We all have times where we want to be able to say something, and one thing that has happened to us as a society lately is we’ve all become so self-conscious. We don’t want to be embarrassed by what we say or who we are. So you either shy away from that and self-censor, or you become a certain kind of bravado. You put yourself out there and be loud, but that leads you down paths that you should be embarrassed by sometimes.

Carol becoming aware of herself seems very human to me. She’s so far out on a limb that she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. She’s hoping to know what she’s talking about. She’s hoping to come to some discovery where the clouds part. Going back to your question about her being a hero, she realizes she’s being ridiculous. She has a whole range of emotions, and she stops herself. She then decides to keep going with a second take. To me, that’s a hero.

Your Raiders of the Lost Ark shot is really stunning. It rivals Breaking Bad’s own Funyuns-infused tribute in “4 Days Out.” 

We rolled right into prep on episode five after I finished shooting three. When we got to that sequence, I was like, “God, I would love to do this ‘Well of Souls’ shot.” We’d been out at the cul-de-sac so many times, and I’d seen the sun set in a nice place I knew would be great. We were still running for our lives on the day, and it took a lot of luck to be able to get it set up at exactly the right time when the sun drops. We got a few takes before the light stopped being magical.

Lastly, you wrote Jimmy McGill’s first dumpster dive on Saul’s “Rico,” so it’s fitting you directed Carol’s first crack at it. Those Duke City Dairy milk cartons lead her to a shocking discovery. What do you want to tease at this juncture?

If you liked where you’ve been so far, you’ll enjoy where we’re going. There’s the Billy Wilder quote of, “Let the audience add up two plus two.” If the audience makes four out of it, it’s really satisfying. So this is a case where we’ve hopefully given the audience two plus two, but we don’t go to the place you think we’re going in the way you think we’re going there.

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Pluribus is currently streaming new episodes every Friday on Apple TV. Read THR’s previous interviews with creator Vince Gilligan, EP Gordon Smith and stars Rhea Seehorn and Karolina Wydra.