It was more than worth it in Seehorn’s eyes. “I remember how thrilled I was with what Peter managed to pull off for the finale…. I was deeply affected by it,” she says. “Bob would say we talk ad nauseam about our scenes, but, this was a case, there wasn’t much talk…because I understood it. I thought, in a way, that it would be best to show instead of tell.”
Gould had the same instinct, as he initially wrote more dialogue for Jimmy and Kim’s jailhouse reunion, only to keep paring it down. Once Jimmy walks into the prison interview room, the two share a quick hello, before almost immediately taking their familiar positions: leaning up against a wall, passing a cigarette back and forth, just 20 words spoken between them. “You had them down to seven years,” Kim says to Jimmy of the plea deal that he blew up, resulting in an eventual sentence of 86 years. He responds, “But, with good behavior, who knows,” to Kim’s amusem*nt. “The characters know very well, this is what we do, and this is a way for us to remember everything that we’ve been to each other, and all the time we’ve spent together and this crazy journey,” Gould shares. “It felt right to do that, and it’s also a neat thing to bookend, not really the show, as much as their relationship.”
Seehorn, who was Emmy nominated in 2022 for her role as Kim, had many seasons to prepare for those final scenes—and even more time to prepare for that smoking. “Well, don’t tell my kids, but I smoked for a little bit when I got out of college, because I did a film where I was supposed to be smoking, and it looked awful,” Seehorn says with a laugh. “You see people [who] have cigarettes in their hand, and it might as well just be another finger. So I got very frustrated with myself, and then got cast in another thing where I was smoking, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to get on top of this this time’ like a dumbass. Excuse my language. I was like, ‘I’m going to learn how to smoke.’… But I quit years ago!”
Seehorn credits her past experience with why she appears so “physically relaxed” when Kim has her turns at taking a drag, even as she also was physically struggling to get through it. “[We smoke] these horrible herbal cigarettes that create five times more smoke than a regular cigarette,” she says. “And so any of those ones where it looks like it’s coolly going up into our eye, Bob and I are just absolutely dying, trying to keep our eyes open.”
From Greg Lewis/AMC
Audiences might not be able to spot how the actors were affected by that, but, if they looked close enough, they could notice one special effect. Like all of the post–Breaking Bad action on Saul, the sequence is in black and white—except for a colored flame on the match and tip of the cigarette. “This was very tricky to do, because when we first tried it, it was all you looked at, and you didn’t really look at their faces,” Gould explains. “It felt very much like a technical thing, and so I took it out completely. And Diane Mercer, our brilliant post-producer, kept on pushing me…and so we kept playing with it. And I'm sure on a lot of TV sets you probably can’t even see that it’s in color, but I would rather have it be too subtle than too bold. It was a little liberty that we took for ourselves at that point.”
Another liberty Gould took was time—maybe too much. With it being the series’ final day of filming, he did start to become concerned that he wouldn’t finish in time and would have to call everyone back the next day. “One of the things I’m so happy with about the scene is how all the thoughts are there underneath the words and they take their time with the moments,” he says. “And I think we earned taking a little bit of time with that scene.” Luckily, director of photography Marshall Adams came up with a unique idea that Gould says “saved my keister.” “We were able to shoot both Bob and Rhea at the same time by using a mirror,” Gould shares. “So the actual angle over Bob to Rhea is using a front-silvered mirror, and then was flipped later. And it was great because it meant that every beat, every connection, they had was all shot continuously.”
