With Pluribus, Karolina Wydra gets to live out many actors’ greatest dream — and their worst nightmare.
Sure, she clocks in and works with creator Vince Gilligan and plays all of her scenes opposite Rhea Seehorn. But the bizarre specificity of her role on the Apple TV drama — she’s essentially the ambassador for a pacified human race with a shared consciousness, thanks to an alien virus — means that she can’t really react.
“I’m Eastern European, and I have a big personality, a lot of feelings,” the Polish-born actress says during a May conversation. “I cry so much that my friends are like, ‘Jesus Christ, just stop!’ So it’s really challenging because there were moments where I’d watch Rhea, whose performance is so beautiful and rich, and I just have to turn mine off? If I watch you do something, I’m going to react to it.”
Naturally, Wydra’s actor friends were surprised when she landed the part of an all-knowing, Zenned-out antagonist on one of the most anticipated series in recent memory. (Gilligan’s Better Call Saul follow-up scored a two-season order in a heated bidding war.) But not just because she has a tendency to be in her feelings. Wydra had been without representation for some time when the possibility of booking the coveted gig first emerged. “I took a break from acting to be a stay-at-home mom,” says the actress, whose previous credits include True Blood, Justified, Sneaky Pete and Agents of SHIELD. “When my agent and manager dropped me, I had no idea how on earth I was going to come back in my early 40s.”
Pluribus casting directors Sharon Bialy, Sherry Thomas and Russell Scott received, it’s been said, somewhere in the vicinity of 5,000 inquiries about the most prominent supporting role in Pluribus. The role of Zosia is, with few exceptions, virtually the only one to get significant screen time with Rhea’s Carol. But when Wydra’s name came up — she’s in the extended Gilligan-verse, having worked with Bryan Cranston on Sneaky Pete — there was no easy way of getting in touch with her.
It was a commercial agent, who didn’t even represent Wydra, who called her about the opportunity. (“I happened to be on their roster, but I wasn’t working with them,” she says.) So, she put herself on tape, was asked to come in and read some fake dialogue and then, after an agonizingly long Christmas break, got the call in the new year that she booked the gig. “I cried and my husband took off his shirt, screaming, so dramatic,” she says. “It was like out of a bad comedy movie.”
Karolina Wydra and Rhea Seehorn in ‘Pluribus.’
Apple TV+
Wydra still didn’t have representation at this point, so she had to “borrow” a manager from her close friend, Outlander star Caitriona Balfe, and get a lawyer. Once the part was hers, she did receive the first two scripts. Zosia is absent from the premiere, but the second episode introduces her as she walks up a dirty hillside in Tangier, pilots a cargo plane to Albuquerque and arrives, clean and calm, as the hive mind’s point of contact to Carol — one of the last baker’s dozen of those left unimpacted by the virus and the show’s narrative engine.
“That’s when I found out the significance of Zosia,” she says. “And I was… so scared.”
Wydra started her research by looking into how high-intelligence people behave, how they move, what do they look like, how do they interact with other people. She and Gilligan decided that Zosia would speak, appropriately, very diplomatically. Still, she found herself occasionally slipping into the natural urge for her character to behave, you know, human.
“We’d be dialing it in on the day,” Wydra says of the shoot. “I’d be doing something and Vince would say, ‘Oh, you look like you have a secret.’ You don’t have secrets. You’re not manipulative. A lot of the time, I would have to go against my own natural instincts.”
The moral lines in Pluribus are blurry, intentionally so. Zosia, while kind and sympathetic during her interactions with Carol, is the series’ de facto villain with a primary goal to force Carol to assimilate. And that dichotomy probably has a lot to do with why the response to Wydra’s performance is so strong. Unsurprisingly, she has an agency and a manager again. Calls are coming in. Meetings are filled with flattering remarks for her work on the show. But when discussing the biggest change, post-Pluribus, Wydra mostly seems reenergized. She’s working on a script with a friend. She’d like to bring Polish stories to international platforms. And she, like viewers of her series, is looking forward to getting back on set when Pluribus resumes production on season two.
“There’s something in this show that touches so deeply on its time,” says Wydra. “When people tell you that they know what’s best for you, that’s just the most dangerous thing. It’s terrifying.”