Transcript of S1E1: We Is Us

Welcome to Pluribus, the official podcast, an intimate insider conversation about the making of the Apple TV series with the cast and creators behind the show. My name is Chris McKayleb. I'm one of the editors of Polaribus and the host of this podcast. If you watched Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul, you might have heard the Insider podcast we did for nearly every episode, going all the way back to season 2 of Breaking Bad. A huge shout out to my mentor, the brilliant editor, Kelly Dixon, for starting those podcasts and pioneering this particular format. Now, this isn't a recap show. Instead, we favor a free wheeling unscripted discussion about the making of each episode. Now, this inaugural podcast is about episode 101 entitled We Is Us, written and directed by Vince Gilligan. So without further ado, let's dive right in with our guests, creator and writer, director of this episode, Vince Gilligan.

Hey, Chris.

Co-executive producer, Trina Siopi.

Hi, Chris.

Writer and co-executive producer, Jenn Carroll.

Hey there.

And Carol Sterka herself, Ray Seahorn.

Hello. Happy to be here.

Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks. Hello. Also with us today on the mix board on the ones and twos is our Assistant Editor, Nicolas Seye. Hello. Nicolas, how are you?

Good. How are you?

Great. And Yeah, this is a homegrown operation here, and this is our first episode, and there's a ton to talk about. But yeah, it's been quite a journey to get to this point, to actually have it done. Oh, man. Yeah. Vince, what was the first kernel of the eight? When did you start thinking about it?

Well, we are recording this in the room that we use as a writer's room for Pluribus. And prior to that, it was a writer's room we used on Better Call Saul. And 8: 00 to 10: 00, it might have been almost a decade ago, but at least eight years ago, we were doing Better Call Saul here, and we would take lunch breaks, and I'd walk around the neighborhood, and I started daydreaming about this idea that became Pluribus. This was long before I had a title for it. And it started off as a wish fulfillment idea in that it started off, it was about a guy. It was about a male character, and something happens in the world, and I hadn't figured that part out yet, but everyone suddenly is very solicitous and will do anything for him. I thought, This will be fun, man. He can do all kinds of fun stuff. The only limitation is your imagination. But then it got porny, quick. Also, you know what? The thing that really threw me off track for a while is I started to think, it's a little like Bewitchd, and I Dream of Genie. Those two shows, it's so weird.

Both the husbands in those shows, or the husband and one, the boyfriend in the other, they're so crabby and stunted and like, Oh, Genie, don't do that. Don't send us to Paris, France. Don't, whatever. Darren on Bewitchd is the same way. He's like, Don't use your magic, Sam. Don't. As a kid, even, I thought, What is wrong with these guys? Even before I was pubescent, I was like, What is wrong with these guys? I did, too. The reason is, from a writer's point of view, and it took me a while to figure this out, is there's no drama in happiness, none whatsoever, which is why we got our hand, one arm tied behind her back on this show. There's no drama in it. I started to realize, you can't make a story just about someone getting every wish fulfilled because it'd be fun until the first commercial break, and then it'd get boring. The other thing I thought was, again, about 8 or 10 years ago, we were doing Better Call Saul, and the lovely Ms. Ray Seahorn sitting across from me here was coming to all of our attention as to how great she is.

I started to think, I want to write something for Ray when this is done. I want to work again with her after this is over, however long this show will go. Luckily, it went six seasons, but I started to think, Well, why does it have to be a male protagonist? Why not a female protagonist? And why not Ray? But she probably can't be so happy. That led to this.

It said in Albuquerque, or where Carol lives in Albuquerque, what was the thought behind going back to Albuquerque after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul? But a totally different side of Albuquerque than we've seen.

I love Albuquerque, and even more than that, I love our crew. I've been working with this. We have been working with this crew for some folks since the very beginning of Breaking Bad, which dates back to 2007, which, as we record this, is what is that, 18 years ago? I can't even believe it when I say it. It can vote.

The concept of That's rude, Jen.

That's very rude.

Yeah. No. I wanted to work with the same crew. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. It did give me a little pause, to be honest, thinking, should we set it in Albuquerque, even though we're shooting in Albuquerque? Then I thought, no, you can't spend half your energy trying to hide the fact.

You mean shoot Albuquerque as a different city?

Yeah, because when they first pitched it to me, Breaking Bad, shoot to shoot Albuquerque as Los Angeles. And that was one of the smart decisions I made. I made a lot of dumb ones, too, but the smart one was, don't pretend this LA because it's going to be very… You can't ever show the Sandias if you do that. But I thought, Isn't it weird? It's Ray Seahorn playing this new character. She's not Kim Wexler. It may bump some people. I can understand why, but I figured, still, it's worth it.

Well, Ray is sporting a very different look than Kim Wexler with Carol.

What I was thinking behind that? I was talking with with Vince and then also Trisha Almeida, the head of our hair department, who also was the ponytail designer on Better Call to All. But she and I were just talking about different looks for the character, but also some practicalities. We knew going in that it would be a lot of, probably a lot of shoots where I am supposed to have not done my hair, maybe not showered. I'm talking throughout the whole season. And with longer hair, you can get into some real predicaments, not even trying to look attractive as much as keeping any continuity because longer hair... Some people have long, thick, lustrous hair like Ms. Cope and Ms. Carroll. But mine gets stringy. And so if it's not quaffed as it was in a Saul, then it could be problematic. And then we were just talking about it would be fun to have a different hairstyle. Then pitched a couple of ideas to Vince, and he liked this chin-length bob that we came up with, which really was helpful, I have to say, whether we're shooting in extreme heat or extreme cold or sweating, or it's supposed to look wet from the shower, all those things.

And then Matt Cradle, our A-Camera op, who's also been with us forever, he and I had a really fun moment because I think it's the first time I'm on screen is the Barnes & Noble scene, right? Yes. Here it is. Which was really fun shooting there. Was it a dolly tracking shot or a slider that you did going behind me?

A slide or slide, revealing the audience, showing the audience, and then revealing you. Wanted to give you a big movie star entrance.

Right. But the back of my head, movie star, back of the head. No, that's actually a cool- Yeah, because you want to hold off.

Vince has always said this, that the coolest introduction is to hold off on seeing the character's face for as long as possible. Of that.

Indiana Jones in Riders of the Lost Dark. He has one of the coolest. Harrison Ford has one of the coolest introductions because Spielberg, who's a genius, holds off Santam. Then when you finally see him, it's like the back of his head. It takes quite a while before you see his face. If you watch that movie, I get- That's awesome.

I'm going to go back and see it. So as Matt was filming it, we did a take, and then I looked over at Matt because so many shots were designed in Better Call Saul that were framing my ponytail and coming up from mind. Sometimes as this barometer of where Kim was at emotionally, I'm like, falling apart, tightly wound. And he got a little chill running up his spine of just like, wow, it is definitely a new character. It was totally a different day because the ponytail is gone. I was thinking the same thing. It's that we had a nice little moment just doing that. I mean, and Matt, when I directed on Saul and chose a shot that was Kim moving her chair, he and I kept working on how he was framing the back of my head. I remember that. Yeah, we had a lot of conversations about it. We did think that was fun, a little subtle. None of us planned it to be that, but I do think it's a subtle little nod of like, We're not in Kansas anymore.

You're right. I admit, I was just thinking of the cool movie star introduction. I was not thinking about, Oh, it's all about her. But that was a really wonderful added benefit. It's, Oh, there's no ponytail here. We're a different character. I thought that was Matt, that reacted to that. It was fun. Then suddenly I went, Oh, yeah, right.

Yes, That's why I did it.

How did you guys come to decide how the others were going to behave when they are seizing and all of that? Because that got introduced in this episode and was something I wasn't sure what it was going to look like either. Of course, you had Hito Lariosa doing the choreography of that. But that was a big ask to ask a lot of background people, some of whom are actors, some may not want to be doing that as a living, but they all had to act. They had to perform.

You were right. It was one of the scarier parts of pre production for me personally because we had big crowd scenes. I don't like big crowd scenes as a director. I mean, I like them fine when I'm watching a movie or a TV show. I don't particularly like directing them. I don't really feel that in control, period, when I'm directing. But the more people I have to direct, the less in control I feel. And the more I have Jen and Trina and Alana, my assistant, and people I trust, and anyone I trust, for that matter, I get folks to stand behind me and look at the monitor and sometimes I give them quadrants of the screen, say, Look in this quadrant, and this quadrant only, look in this one. Because you're looking at for some one person out of 100 to be staring at the camera or just doing something wrong. I have to say, our extras were really good. They did a great job, but Neto directed the extras. I didn't. I had a much more minimal hand, but Neto- Well, they had totally separate rehearsals.

Yeah.

Nito and Trina was invaluable, and Jen was invaluable. These ladies- Our eight assistant directors because really the folks-Oh, my God. Yes. Angie.

Yeah. So Nito would choreograph, and certainly Trina and Alana and I would watch But the people who are really responsible are the assistant directors for talking to the background performers.

That's true. Then it still had to be dialed in on the day. I remember quite a few takes, rightfully so, being about what is the tone? How scary do these people look? How passive do they look? As we all found out, it's very difficult to passively look pleasant without looking crazy, lobotomized, high as a kite, freakish.

They can't be smiling.

No. What is this thread? That's creepy. Or needle that you have to thread. I do want to shout out, prior to them becoming others, the background people that were in the Barnes & Noble were phenomenal. Oh my gosh, hilarious. All those people crushed it.

How scripted was that sequence? There's so much little- Very little, though.

Some scripted, some were lines thrown out on the day.

We did upgrade some of the background performers. We chose a few and upgraded them. Then on the day, Vin, Satrina, and Angie and I would prep those folks who are waiting in line to talk to you. I remember we were running up and down the line being like, Okay, here's the backstory. Here are the characters. Here's some things you might want to ask about. Maybe you're a fan of Book 2, and you have a question about the amulet, stuff like that.

It took a village. It was a group effort, and these guys all did a great job. The extra did a great job. Miriam and Ray. Oh, my God. Some of the very funniest lines Miriam and Ray came up with. What was the one about the support person?

What was the- Oh, yeah. That's really funny.

Yeah, Miriam introducing the woman-The couple.

The support person. Yes. The two of you together were just a perfect pair.

Spectacular. She's so great. I had not met her before we did this, and I just loved. Well, I called her before we started, and I was like, Congratulations. I can't wait. I can't wait to meet you and tell me when you're getting in your town. She was just like, I don't want to badmouth any show she's been on, but she was like, I don't really remember the last time the lead called me to say, Congratulations. I can't wait to see you. But I'm sure some have. But she was referencing whatever. But she was so great, and we hit it off instantly. We just had such a fun time. I was telling, I don't know if I told you guys, the escalator scene when we get back on the airplane- With the gum. Super hard. Super hard, and I'm not joking. What? Because we both had wheelie bags that only fit a certain way. We've all done it. You get on the escalator with your wheelie bag, and it may or may not actually fit on the same step you're standing, or does it need to be on the step in front of you or the step behind you?

And who are you getting in the way of? And she had to be on one side and we can't block each other. And she's got a bag and I have a bag and it needed to look pretty smooth. We've done it a thousand times because we travel for book tours, blah, blah, blah. And we're just starting to get it. And then we're also trying to figure out when the camera comes in the view as we descend without looking for the camera, obviously. And I'm playing how my character is feeling about her switching the books upstairs, and And then, Vince goes, And now you're going to hand her a piece of gum. And we were like, What? So then we try to do that. She's like, Because I need one hand for the rail and one hand for the suitcase. I was like, I got a hand on a suitcase alone. And so we're trying to figure... She's unwrapping the gum. That's taking too long. We're on camera too fast for the unwrapping of the gum. And then, Vince, this goes, So what if you're handing her... Do people hand people a piece of gum like this?

And he hands her a stick of gum that's peeled like you would see, like a cartoon banana at the top in a way that no one would ever, ever peel gum, let alone with one hand. She's doing it with one hand. She and I are both like, Yeah, sure. And then slept, and we were like, No one does that. What are we going to do? What are we going to do? So finally, we decide, gum is pre-unwrapped. We're in thousands of discussions, and then we're practicing it over and over and over on the moving steps. And then we almost fall over, we get back up. To this day, if Miriam is traveling and goes through an airport on an escalator, or I do, we text each other and go, Nailed it. Just did the escalator.

I have a bag.

I've got gum. You should have seen me. Oh, my Incredible. We're pretty proud of the escalator scene. I just want to throw that out there. That's a highlight. It is.

We didn't make that day, but yeah.

Exactly.

No, I'm kidding.

She's so much fun. She's a blast.

You guys have effortless chemistry. It's really effortless.

Was it effortless?

It looks effortless. You're both great actors. I think that goes without saying, but there seems to be something just intangible about just the chemistry that you have.

We share a similar warped sense of humor. Mine might be darker and hers might be slightly more warped. But we share a history of theater, a love of New York theater. But I think mostly, I honestly think mostly what it is, is two people that have been working for a long time and are so thrilled to still be getting to do what we love and then to be on a set. She instantly realized, starting from my phone call and then probably conversations with Jen and Vince and Trina and everybody. She was saying all the same things that I was saying on Sol of like, my God, the costume designer wants to talk to me about character, not how short my skirt is or what the network would like. And deep dives into character. And then we're rehearsing. I could see how much she loved that room to play, that big safety net to take risks. And instantly, we were both women that are gals-gals. I'm not there to compete with anybody or the guys. I want you to be the best you've ever been today, and that's going to make me better, and that's going to make the scene better.

That shouldn't be an anomaly, but it can be. And people would ask about what chemistry looks like. For me, it's two things. It's showing up to set, doing all your prep, and then being delighted to have a curve ball thrown at you by your scene partner if they have done their work. Not to screw with you, but because they're being in character and they want to play, and then you're throwing them something back. And that tether between you that your line reading could never be the same until you heard how they did theirs, reads as chemistry because you are invisibly connected. And then the second thing is really, really, really being each other's cheerleader. I want her to be great, and I respect everything she's doing. And if she wants to try something that involves me trying something, we would do it together. And it just made us... You just are a team.

I think some of the scenes where I see that chemistry in this show, and in Saul, too, are the of the quieter moments. There's fewer words spoken. I think about the scene right after the Barnes & Noble, the signing, getting in the car, and Carol. We see a different side of Carol, like a darker side, maybe the more real side. It's interesting hearing Carol. She speaks very differently about herself and her work than she does when she's around her fans, which I found very interesting. I guess the duality of the artist, the way that we present ourselves versus the way that maybe we think about ourselves.

I mean, yeah, a part of it was just... It's fun to surprise the audience, but part of it was, Carol is so good with her fans. Your character is very good in that signing scene. She's very warm and authentic and loves her fans. Then she gets in that car and it's like, What a bunch of bullshit. Hopefully, that doesn't read like she's inauthentic, truly. She's being fake. She's lying to the fans. I think it's more like there's this duality she has where she really does love her fans and is proud of her work, and then somehow poops on it in the next breath. I think it speaks to something bigger. I don't think Carol is meant to be happy, or she feels like perhaps she's not meant to be happy. Maybe part of it doesn't have to do with her fans at all, but has more to do with the idea that every time she starts to get a little bit happy, a little bit pleased, a little bit satisfied, she has to find, rationalize, find some reason as to why she's not really happy. It's not really worthy of her to be writing this series of romance novels or whatever.

But she's full of it. I think Helen, more than anyone else on Earth, knows that, knows her best of all, and just calls her on it in the bar, for instance. Oh, it must be so tough to be you with all these loving friends. Helen is… You two really are great together. That, again, that chemistry. It's so important that they are because they have very few scenes together in that first episode when you think about it. You really need for it, structurally, speaking from a writer's point of view, you really need it to hit hard when what happens to Helen happens to Helen.

You have to feel that loss, and you do.

That night, I cried watching people in the screen tears in my eyes. I know.

Those were tough nights. Yeah.

You had to keep doing it. See, it's one thing to do it once. I don't know who very few people could do it to that level. You did it even once. But then you got, how do you do it over and over again?

I mean, there's things that I give myself. I mean, to be technical about it, the homework for me, the homework of the as ifs of have you experienced anything like this in your life and how did you behave? Have you watched other people? How did they behave? So you can start thinking about the different reactions and tools that different people have. I do that homework at home just to analyze it, because for me on the day to rely on thinking about your dead dog in the corner and then coming over is not repeatable after a while. You can't keep doing that. And sometimes it's hard to take direction if you're coming from a place that's literally just self purging, that's just for me and how I work. So I'll then give myself some markers. One of the things I'll do is ask myself where the pain lives, because most of the time when you're in extreme pain about something, it lives somewhere in your body. It's a lump you can't swallow, or it's a burning in your chest, or it feels like somebody's sitting on your diaphragm or your face feels like it's getting hot.

And I find that, strangely, to be more repeatable as the instigator to tell your body, This is where we're at. And then, I guess just having done it this long, my job, if I have understood how the character feels about this other character being in pain, and I am graciously gifted a scene partner that is fantastic, as Bob was, as Miriam is, looking at them through the eyes of my character makes me feel that. It isn't like I lose my mind and I think I'm the other... But do you know what I mean? As long as you can start I can then play the scene and I'm there, as opposed to wandering around. And I do goof off between scenes, and sometimes I have to because it gets so heavy. And I think I told you after a couple of takes one night, I was like, I need a minute because my gag reflex kept going up because I was choking, sobbing so hard. And then poor Miriam, once she was on screen, she couldn't stop crying for me. And I'm like, You can't be crying. She was like, Shit. But we would have some laughs to relieve it.

For instance, it was freezing cold, and every time we got up to give everybody a break, and I run pretty high, but I got cold, and Miriam runs cold and got freezing. And she's on the bed of that truck, which was metal. So they took tons of hand warmers, and they're all up and down in her shirt, in her jacket, in her pants. And every time she'd get up to walk take a break, she would just be pooping hand warmers. They were just tons, coming out of sleeves, coming out of pants legs. I was laughing my head up. But yeah, so I just And you try to tell the story again and again. And it gets harder because we shot different parts of it over two nights. So when you come back the next night and you would come and tell me, rightfully so, I need you to start at 14, where you were last night. It's like, we're not going 1: 00 to 14. We have to start from 14. And so I would go home and I would make notes of where were you in that moment? Is it just different markers? Is this the moment where it feels like a mule kicked you in the chest?

Is this the moment where you're in absolute denial, which is its own physical reaction to something? And I know we filmed it a couple of different ways, and I know that you and I both thought it was imperative for it to be difficult to watch and wrenching because there's so few scenes. This grief and what it does to Carol and her decision making moving forward needed to have weight so that it stays in people's minds. Absolutely.

It's so great working with pros. I tell you. Thank you. For the folks listening who want to direct, this is probably an obvious statement if you think about it, but from a director's perspective, you need to protect your actor as much as possible in a big scene like So we started with the close-ups because that's where the money is, cutting into the forehead, whatever the closest of the close-up. We started with that stuff because I knew in a moment like that, we're going to cut to the close-up. And then we work backward from there and get wider.

Which was really helpful. And you're also really great with explaining to me how we're going to shoot. And it's not that I save it, but there are different things I do to physically protect myself if I know we're doing it 10 hours versus 2 hours or whatever, whatever we're doing that day. And something that I thought was very interesting that the listeners might think was interesting, and I don't know if you guys were privy to it, Trina and Jen, probably. But you came to me on the second day we were shooting it, and you said There's something that keeps bumping me. I said, It's the same thing that keeps bumping me. And it was why she leaves Helen's body to get up out of the truck and go follow these people. And we both kept tossing around ideas, and you're always the smartest person in the room. But it's been really incredible for me that we have had collaboration at times on, let's figure out who this character is and what the tone is and all that. And I remember that night, we figured out that her anger, almost, that why are these people getting up and my wife isn't, is what makes her get up and go, I got to get some answers.

Like, what the F is going on? Katherine Madsen, our lovely the sound post sound.

Supervising sound editor.

Supervising sound editor. She and quite a few other people that I've seen the pilot have mentioned that millisecond look that I do down to Helen before I get out of the truck, and they're like, It kills me. And I was like, That makes me so happy that... You guys think things through to the nth degree, but there's still the thing that happens on the day that you didn't know this was going to not read this way, or this was that, and that was that. To have tiny, tiny, tiny storytelling moments like that that you give the space on set for us to care about and to figure out, and then to have an audience follow it was just really rewarding for me.

That was a tough scene, but a very rewarding scene. I was so lucky to have you doing it because I didn't have to worry about you. The thing I remember worrying about the most during that scene is, and all the extras were great. They did a very good job, but I I didn't quite know what to do with them. As in, they come out, and a lot of them just stand there and look at the fire, look at the sparks coming. It's not a fire, the sparks coming from the ambulance. This bothered me not just on the set, but weeks and weeks ahead of it. I remember thinking, What are they doing? And then I thought, Well, they're smart enough to know that you can't touch the ambulance without getting electrocuted because there's a live wire on top of it. But stuff like that, the logistical stuff, the stuff that gets you sometimes more than the... Because I knew I could trust you to pull it off, so I wasn't worried about you. I didn't. But it's just the funny, the things you worry about, What are all these extras doing? I don't want them standing there like a bunch of lumps for too long.

But they really pulled it off. They did a great job.

Did you audition the background people?

We did. We had open auditions for actors, for background, for anybody, really. We had them show up to a dance hall or theater, and they would meet with Nido, I think, in groups of five or 10. We used so many background. Hundreds. Hundreds.

Thousands.

It was great. I think I'm sure you've done background work. I've done background work. A lot of times it's like, Oh, just start here and just grab this folder and walk across the room, and then you watch so, and you see maybe your little flutter of your shirt or something. I think it was great for the background to act. Sure. They felt like they were part of the scene. They were part of the show. It gave They were thrilled about it.

They were very much are, too.

Yeah, they were thrilled about it. And it was a fabulous job.

We had some really good- They did. One thing you did, Ray, that I have never seen anyone else do, was you would give, during that first episode, especially, you would give a speech to the background. You would gather everybody up, and you would talk to them, and you would thank them for being there, and you would remind them that what they were doing was so critical to the story, and that they were part of the world the same way you were. And it inspired them to get through some of very cold night shoots, as you said. They were in every shot.

And there were some very hot ones later.

Oh, indeed.

Thank you. I think I did every time we had a large group that was with me. Vincent and I would tell them we have a lot of fabulous postproduction on this show because it requires it. But by and large, you kept things as practical as possible when it came to the people. They're not tiled and CGI and all that. I know that was important to these people that they were being valued as you are acting. They're acting in a synchronized way and as a unit, but they are individual people. They are not robotics. So people have different ambling walks or ways of gesturing or slightly different facial expressions. And they were all doing it. And then there for me. And I told them, yeah, they were my scene partners. And they were creating this world that is completely up to them for the audience to understand what is this. What is this thing we're looking at, and wordlessly. I did want to thank them, and I have done background work. And I think feeling respected for how hard that job is to do well is only going to get us further.

Feeling seen. Feeling seen. Feeling seen because they are very much a part of the scene as anyone else. Without them, it would not have.

100%.

Absolutely true. It was interesting. It was an evolution, Chris, about the side. When I wrote the thing a long time ago, because I started writing this thing literally years and years ago, I thought everyone should speak in perfect unison. Everyone should move in perfect. I was picturing some stuff I had seen, like Cirque de Soleil do, and very graceful, very imperfect. Or the Marine Corps drill team, if you've ever seen those guys. Amazing. Throw them one rifles in the air and the guy behind it catches it without looking and all this stuff. I know it's humanly possible, but you literally got to spend years practicing it, and we can't spend years. It seems like we can, but we can't. But it came to dawn on all of us, I think, that people speaking too much in perfect unison is actually not pleasing. We wound up in the sound mix, for instance, staggering people talking all at once just a little bit, because if they're too perfectly in unison, somehow it doesn't have the effect you want. You need Interesting. You need them not so perfectly in unison.

That uncanny valley a little bit. Something's not right about this, and it bothers your brain.

So did you guys do that even on that first time when they speak to me?

In this call to the truck, right? Oh, outside the hospital, too.

Outside the truck is In the hospital is the first time I think they speak to me. Yes.

But the other thing is, especially a bunch of people, as good as those extras were, a bunch of people in hour 11 of the night when it's that cold outside. They're not the Marine Corps drill team. They never will be. They can't do it in perfect sync. But then I think we added more voices in post and made it a bigger crowd, so to speak, in post, and staggered it maybe a little more still.

Because we wanted it to feel human. That's been the guiding thought behind Almost every decision we make about the others, wouldn't you say? Because they're people. They're not robots. They're not aliens. They're human. Then staggering the voices and people speaking in whatever accent that they have and people walking with a limp. If they have a limp, they're not superhuman. They're just people.

Right.

One place where their movements were a bit more synchronized was in the patient zero area at US AMRID. I know we're going to run out of time. I just wanted to get into that section because those clean suits, what are the positive pressure suits? Those are so cool. He talk a little bit about... Because those were constructed and there's a fully function.

It's funny that you use the word cool. The hot suits. The space suits.

They really are something. You guys talk about them. They were cool and expensive.

They are based off of real suits. We had to make the suits for the actors as well as have our special effects team pump air into them so that they could breathe because they're actually enclosed suits. So we had little mini fans in there. Special effects had air tubes running through across the ceiling. So when they plug in, it actually does. Also, you have to worry about the mask teeming up, the temperature. If they're hot It's hot inside, it's hot out. You couldn't keep them in there for too long.

You can only be unplug for 10 minutes, but the suits had to be popped up, so you needed the air running. And we needed to use special microphones to communicate with them. If you were standing next to somebody while the suit was on, they couldn't hear you. So they had to speak into a mic to give his direction.

So that they could hear each other.

I was going to say so they couldn't hear each other until you did...

Then we had to rehearse with them ahead of time so that we knew that they could move in the suit.

They had to be expunction.

Do we have technical advisors on that?

Oh, yes. That's quite a good one.

We did.

For that sequence, we had a scientist, Erin McDonald, who was instrumental in the montage and figure out what people are doing, and also talking to us during pre-production. Hopefully, it's okay to say, Vincent, in your first iteration of the scene, there was one scientist in the lab. One thing Aaron said to us is in a biosafety level for a lab, you would never have one person. You rewrote the scene to have a second scientist. I think it's so much better.

I think so, too. I just went with my old X file learning from years ago. A person by themselves, it's going to be scarier. So that's the way I intended it. But then, yeah, Aaron said, it just doesn't work that way. I thought for a microsecond, as I always do, well, artistic license, let's just keep it this way. Then I thought, it's never steered me wrong. It's always held us in me me and us as a group. It's held us in good stead when we get things technically accurate or as accurate as we humanly can. It never has harmed us. It has always paid dividends. We listened to her. I rewrote dialog, I restructured things based on what she said and based on what her technical advisor from the VLA said.

Yes, Brian Svaboda. In the scene where we have the 20 scientists at the VLA, those were all real scientists who work there. We put the and said, Anybody who wants to be? Then we essentially had to do a lottery because so many folks wanted to be part of it.

Those are real nerds, not fake ones. That's awesome.

Actually- They're in good company with all of us, for sure.

The IQ level in that tiny trailer must have been That must have set an all-time world record.

They're like a clown- They're smarter than the whole crew put together. Oh, God.

But a clown- The crew's brilliant, too. This clown car of geniuses.

In the lab, too, we used real lab when we did the montage?

When they're doing the swaps and all that?

The background performers. Not the montage with Nito after they... But the- The science montage.

The science montage in the BSL 2.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

We did put the call out to any background performers that had a background in science. Then on the day, Erin would say, Oh, this is this type of centrifuge, whatever. We'd say, the assistant director or whoever would say, Does anyone know how to run this test? And six hands would be raised. Because we wanted people who knew how to use the equipment. Erin herself is in that scene as well.

Oh, yeah?

Brian's in the scene at the VLA.

Yes, with the fabulous sweater.

Yes, that's right. I love it so much. That's right. But it's... And Nito, that scene where they're doing the swabbing, the actors doing the swapping in perfect unison, that scared me. But Nito, really, I said to Nito what I wanted, and Nito made it happen, and I went and had a sandwich, and it was...

It's always a sandwich.

It's always a hot dog. I love hot dogs.

We should mention his assistant, too, because Marissa did also play a big role.

Marissa did a wonderful job. She was awesome. But I was so pleased and grateful and relieved that they made that work because I don't know anything about choreography.

Before we wrap up, something that surprised me the first time, and every time I see it, is how I'm laughing out loud with Davis Tafler on the screen. That's so good. The Kyrons on the screen and the Kairons on the... Your life is your own. We're not aliens. We're not aliens, yeah. That stuff is so funny to me, and that there could be this tonal shift right at the end after this apocalyptic terror that Carol has just experienced and is still experiencing, even though as an audience, because we're not experiencing it physically. I love that part so much. I love that wild tonal shift.

I do, too. I I don't know how it works exactly. I'd have a hard time deconstructing it in terms of telling people how to do it, but it starts with great actors. It starts with people. And it's the truth. And also, I learned that it could be done. Yeah. On the X-Files years and years ago. X-files was a very serious show, but a writer named Darren Morgan, wonderful writer, proved to all of us that the show could be funny. Because up to a certain point, there was a couple of dark humor moments, but Darren was the first writer to write a really full-out funny one. It was great. And ever since then, maybe even before, but ever since then, certainly, I've always been intrigued by how elastic a story can be in terms of how dark can you go, how dramatic can you go, and then how quickly can you shift gears. And this show does that. And it starts with the actors being honest and never... We could do a whole hour just about humor and comedy, and you could teach a course in it, but it's the timing. No, I don't think so.

And comic timing. And knowing, even when your character is deadly serious, knowing where the laughs are.

Yeah, but not playing the laugh. But not playing. It's an interesting It's an interesting thing.

It sure is.

And Peter Bergman was so great.

Peter Bergman.

I got to give him- Great. Yes. Playing Tafler.

Davis Tafler. Davis Tafler. Davis Tafler, USDA. Peter Bergman, my wife Holly and I have known him for He and his wonderful wife, Mary Ellen, and they were introduced to us by Brian Cranston and Robin Dyrdent, Brian's wife. And Peter wound up on The Young and the Restless. He's been on it over, I think, around 40 years now. Wow. And he is the sweetest guy. He's so nice. He and his wife are wonderful, wonderful folks. It was so much fun. And that was not a burn-in. You were really watching him on TV. Yes. Burn-in meaning we shot it separately and then digitally composited onto your TV, on the Carroll's TV, on the set. You were actually watching a live TV. He was in the other sound stage. It took a lot of technical figuring out.

I did not know that.

Phil Palmer figured out earwigs that both Peter could use on the other stage and I could use that wouldn't interfere with the recording that you're trying to do of our voices separately because you don't want to hear his voice coming on my ear, which was Really fun. Really cool to be able to play off of each other in that way.

At one point, your earwig fell out, and we digitally erased it out of your ear. Sorry. Well, no. I mean, it was just- You never broke performance.

No. Your performance was so good. We used the take where the earwig fell out.

Well, speaking of earwigs falling out, our earwigs are falling out of our ears right now and out of our mouths. How about that? I don't even know what that means.

That's not a thing.

That's all the time we have for this week. But, yeah, thank you guys for coming and being here. Thanks for listening.

This was so much fun. All right.

Thank you so much to Ray Seahorn, Jen Carroll, Trina Siopi, and Vince Gilligan. And thank you for listening to the first episode of Pluribus, the official podcast, an Apple TV podcast, produced by Highbridge Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Be sure to follow on Apple podcast to get the next episode in your feed and watch Pluribus on Apple where available. Our editor and mixer is Nicolas Tsai. Theme music by Dave Porter. Associate producers are Elana Hoffmann, Justin Verbeest, and Nicolas Tsai. Executive producers are Jenn Carroll and me, your host, Chris McCaleham. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.