How That ‘Better Call Saul’ Death Was Kept Secret From Bob Odenkirk & Rhea Seehorn | Making A Scene

i think i'm in the middle of something uh there's really no need oh hey kids are out there if you're gonna die don't die with your mouth open okay don't die with your mouth open because it'll come back to fight to the s [Music] hey how you doing this is patrick fabian i play howard hamlet on better call salt hi i'm bob odenkirk i play jimmy mcgill saul goodman i'm ray seahorn and i play kim wexler hi i'm tony dalton i play lalo salamanca i'm tom schnauz and i directed and wrote the better call saul episode plan and execution and this is varieties making a scene i i thought you did it for the money but now it's it's so clear screw the money you did it for fun you get off on it we knew something bad was going to happen in jimmy and kim's world we just didn't know what whether they were going to mess up somehow in their plan or howard was going to catch them in something but then as we went on with the season we thought colliding the cartel world and the legal slash scam world just felt like the right thing to do i found out actually before season 6 began peter gould and vince gilligan and melissa bernstein the three producers called me before the season began now if you're an actor out there guess what call you don't want to get before you're going to work yeah it's that call um but the thing is they called me to just say so we've come up with a really cool thing for howard but what it means is that we're probably not going to need your services past august this season once the writers knew i was not part of the call that patrick got and he asked who was doing it and he heard it was me so he was he said he was happy about that oh my gosh i'm actually thanking tom schnaubs for killing me oh that sounds like it thank you tom patrick and i are good friends and i'm glad i got to do what is essentially a howard hamilton episode obviously they wanted to keep this as hush-hush as possible so i forgot about it and i've spent six seasons not telling my wife or family or friends what's going on in the show i only talk about the show with the people on the show but even in this case i didn't tell anybody in the show either i would get the scripts and i would be like not this week and i started to think well maybe they changed their minds maybe in the writers room they're like you know what we've got something better for howard maybe he's going to go do this or that i think it's just denial it's actor denial i opened up episode 607 by this point wardrobe knew property knew people around the set are just like hey man sorry so i knew it was coming down and then ray and bob read it i assumed it to be very dangerous if lalo is showing up and putting a silencer on a gum um but then midline when it just says pfft you know and it's him i was like and i think bob was upstairs and i think i was in the kitchen i was like did you read it did you read this and they called vince they like did did patrick get this yet and they're like oh yeah he's known for six months patrick was so convincing in not telling us that i thought that it was possible he didn't know it was coming and called peter frantically and i was like i don't think patrick knows does he know that it's coming out peter's like i definitely told him and i was convinced that he wasn't told so it was a big surprise to me and then i read the episode and of course um that great scene at the end with jimmy and kim in their apartment and then i turn the page and it says lalo enters and i go huh and then literally a half page later he's he's the only one left speaking saying let's talk and it hit me and took my breath away i was kind of just off on the sidelines in the first half of the last of the last season so to just kind of jump in there and go into going to their apartment and shoot our heads like wow frankly i've been waiting for this scene for a while i think that jimmy and kim have been pulling these pranks especially regarding howard for a while there's always consequences in this world of breaking bad and better call saul and i've been waiting and hoping and wanting there to be consequences for these characters all right you're too tight to drive i'm calling you oh good phony compassion no very very believable but i'm far from done oh no no you are done howard sorry but you need to stop this now and you need to go home the way i worked on it was first by taking it in chunks i'd sit down with a yellow legal pad and i would write it all out that's the first thing i do but then they go back to the other script as well because i want to write on it ideas symbols and you circle stuff and underline stuff questions about where does this come from what's going on and so we would rehearse loosely lines ideas we'd discuss things we'd have some ideas so when we come to play in front of the top or whatever director you know we have something to show them i certainly ran lines with patrick quite a bit for his monologue because we couldn't because we were in the house together but then we had rehearsals with tom to figure out the blocking this is a involved scene a lot of feelings in it a lot of lines in it a lot of characters brains moving you know very fast there's a bit of a game going on first they're going to play like they don't know what he's talking about and then jimmy can't help himself but but to say well you know well howard you know it's not not that bad you didn't lose everything but they're kind of letting him take the stage kim then starts doubling down and you see her hatred of him and what she thinks he represents and there's no conscience going on of maybe he's right and maybe he didn't deserve all of this and like completely missing the point that she deserves she she deserves it believe it you can't hide who you really are forever bob's great reaction on his face of seeing lala the ghost the person who he thought was dead walk through the door kim has lied about him being alive and she's aware that to jimmy this is a double shock i look at careless i mean he's done this a thousand times in this case everybody who's watching is emotionally attached to the character but i mean for lalo it's not he's just like i don't know who this guy is shoots him and then says okay now that you know i'm serious let's get let's get to it as a director i had all i had all these different shots bob's eyeball i had him close his eye and open it in the light so his pupil would contract and i did all these other different angles and i spent all this time with skip mcdonald in the editing room trying to make it work and it just was not working and we found that the simpler version where it's just the shadow coming in behind patrick fabian and bob's reaction was enough to sell the fear i didn't need all the trickery i uh think i'm in the middle of something there's really no need we probably didn't rehearse the gunshot at all and the reason for that is that's the kind of thing you want to experience in the moment we wanted it to be a little bit messy and not exactly uh a glossy type of cinematic uh reaction because we really wanted to hammer home that it needs these need to be people that have not seen that kind of violence someone's head being blown off right in front of you it needed to be utterly shocking and not something and a a world break you know for kim that oh my god this is happening his body at her feet is the embodiment of guilt and the conscience that she has been saying keeps sneaking up on her when she talks about being followed it's only when he got into the patrick dropping to the floor because we had to do a whole rig a safety rig that's the same rig we got on michael mckeon when he hit his head in the coffee shop um it's just you want him to fall and hit safe you know make it look like he's really banging his head but he doesn't um so there's a that part gets time consuming they move the couches in the table uh they put a pad down um and the first couple of times i would just fall out of frame we would time it you know oh we had somebody off stage with uh uh i think about uh two by fours that would do the shot so i would sense him coming up we'd start to work on the timing of what that was he says the line the gun comes up and i fall out of frame and then you know then all the blood people come in they love you know spraying the blood on the wall that's the whole thing special effects making that work and then they harness me up for the hidden table and what they do is they put you in a harness and then you put your suit on and the harness takes all of your weight and then properties we created the table with a sponge and soft they made it all like rubbery they painted it meticulously so it looks like that and they put all the props back and everything else and then they had the camera lined up so my head's just coming into frame and they're like it's gonna go like this so i'm coming down but they're gonna have a sound effect so what it really is is my head ricocheting off is what makes people lurch it's the sound of my neck going and then pounding off so we did it like three or four times uh and then vince and then tom's like i don't want to hurt your head anymore you know like any dummy act i'm like no no i'll hit my head all day long and i would but they had it and then the roll they put the camera down on the ground right and it's a pov of that and so that starts from me just pretending that my head is there and then we had worked it back backwards you know i got to the spot they needed me to be with the eyes looking at the camera oh hey kids are out there if you're going to die don't die with your mouth open okay don't die with your mouth open because it'll come back to bite in the ass um so i'm dying with my mouth open and um we did that we did that a bunch of times and then you know then you get that great direction that great heartfelt direction where tom's like yeah yeah eyes are too open no no look more dead okay get that mouth open a little bit more yeah that sucks yeah oh my god oh my god no no we have fun on sets and we've done plenty of serious scenes where to you got to blow up steam sometimes and you're cracking jokes backstage but this is a goodbye to a close friend of ours and a beloved character it's very somber because it's also patrick's last team you know and he's been in the secretaries of the whole run so you know everybody's very quiet and very very respectful the crew all stood you know very very close by and was very um sensitive when coming in for resets and everything that this is one of our family who's going it's a group of people who really love each other but we play some characters who torture each other i love everyone in the show and the opportunity it gave all of us to show what we could do if you got to go wow what they wrote for him to go and i was excited about watching that work and excited that we could all be with him on his last shooting day we've spent so much time together we've been through such an experience together in our careers and in our personal lives and we are shocked and impacted when one of our one of our characters is dismissed no i didn't get to keep the suits uh the reason probably is because i think sony probably paid more for those suits than they did for the guys [Music] you

Channel: Variety

Views: 1,706,935

Keywords: Variety, Variety Studio, better call saul, final scene, making a scene, rhea seehorn

Id: X7jnkDQAWwk

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022