The penultimate season 5 episode, “Bad Choice Road,” saw Kim once again rise and surprise.
And in that one bold moment, she saved Jimmys.
How should viewers interpret Kims game-changing decisions?
Credit: Greg Lewis/AMC
Is she now in the game with Jimmy/Saul, voluntarily or not?
How did you go about getting a handle on her in season 5?
And then there was an external scene happening at the same time.
Those things created a lot of tension.
Reading her facial expressions has become an Olympic-level challenge, by the way.
Weve seen Kim slip and run scams with Jimmy in the past.
Which one took you the longest time to wrap your head around before getting intoherhead?
Quite a few of them.
Yes, it is bizarre.
Its extreme behavior that’s starting to come out of her because of how long she has been suppressing.
And she suppresses her emotion.
Jimmy is the more emotional of the two.
Which is really fun to play when you talk about male-female stereotypes.
She is very pragmatic, solution-oriented.
Like, Let’s just figure it out.
We don’t need to discuss it.
And he wants to deal with everything with his emotions.
So that was challenging, but exciting.
The tone of that scene I found difficult to hold onto.
She can’t deal with the emotional question because it doesn’t have a right answer.
So she goes for what is legal and logical and works in black and white.
What you’re talking about in episode 9, all of that stuff was hard.
I keep saying hard, and what I mean is the greatest gift you get as an actor.
Is it a mistake, or is it planned?
In the scene when she’s confronting Lalo, it is a bit of both.
I think she’s sitting there the entire time terrified for both of them, trying to take in.
Every time Lalo was asking Jimmy something, his story is looking shaky.
Could I call 911?
How would I explain this?
Where are our keys?How far down from the balcony could we climb?
[Laughs] And then this thought occurs to her and I think it’s half-baked.
It’s very similar to how she approached Kevin Wachtell to get her job back.
That was fun finding my way around that.
All of these scenes took a while.
But they’re puzzles to me, and I like puzzles.
And what happened in between?
I’m just always like, Oh!
He’s by no means just paralyzed through the scene.
Kim keeps checking in with him to see how far to go.
And I think it was more the latter.
And she keeps having to say more and shes searching for, What gets under this guy’s skin?
How can I win this argument intellectually?
He’s towering over me.
I can’t win it physically."
I think she is out of options.
And that’s that idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic properties.
Who was she before and who would she be if she never met Jimmy?
You could also ask the same question of him.
Or, who would he be if he’d never met Mike?
Have you considered this?
And I think part of that is because it’s reciprocity.
Kim loathes being told how to think or what to do or how she should feel.
And her ego I loved that moment!
She should have just let him gracefully take her off the case and be done with it.
But she could not stand being accused of something that she’s actually culpable for.
[Laughs] And it’s her ego.
But I knew the end of the scene is that they’re successful.
So she had to have been able to pull it off to a certain degree.
Tom [who wrote the episode] was like, We’re not entirely sure.
And I said, Me, too!
And it’s weird!
And I don’t know what’s happening!
We were like, Okay!
Let’s do it.
So those are the questions that remain still now.
She’s in the moment making these decisions.
Would she have ever been involved with the cartel if it wasn’t for Jimmy?
That seems to be a stretch, but I also don’t know.
They were also friends in the mailroom for a long time.
Would she have become a successful lawyer if she was never around Jimmy?
Maybe he had some positive influences on her as well.
It’s legal or illegal, and there’s nothing in between!
And she found out that that’s a load of crap.
That’s just not how life is.
The actor, Rhea.
[Laughs] I think Kim is still compartmentalizing.
I still think she thinks she’s not.
And that’s dangerous.
It’s a lot of denial.
How did you reconcile that?
Giving up Schweikart and Coakley, and the Mesa Verde case, are two huge decisions.
She could have done one or the other.
Even those are colored with lots of different layers as well.
And I think she probably is lying to herself in saying that.
If you’re just talking theoretically at the table, Kim deserved Mesa Verde as a client.
She did all the work.
That has nothing to do with what’s legal and illegal about how she got it back from Chuck.
So that’s already ill-gotten gains.
She has issues with people who are the Ken Wins of the world.
It’s not just Jimmy that doesnt like those people.
And you could argue this is because she didn’t come from much.
She doesn’t like people that don’t seem to have made their own way in the world.
She doesn’t like people that don’t care about trickle-down effect and helping anyone else.
So she’s got a little moral chip on her shoulder that is also getting in the way.
It’s fun to pretend that she’s a martyr, but she’s not.
So she’s taking all of that into this, and then this crazy thing happens.
And I think you’re right that it looks like an insane turn.
Kim did defuse the situation in the apartment, but how much so?
We know Lalos a sharp, impulsive, and relentless man…
Kim is very intelligent.
But she’s in the business of taking it a step at a time at this point.
No, I don’t think the fear is gone.
And I haven’t seen the scene.
I don’t know if they kept the shot of me exhaling after he leaves.
[Laughs]
They did.
Because I firmly believe that Kim is even aware that this was a bit of a performance.
And that it’s a Band-Aid.
But I think she thinks she’s buying them time to figure out what the hell to do.
In legal terms, its a continuance.
At this point in our journey, how do you compare Jimmy and Kims moral compasses?
Jimmy’s intentions are, for the most part, quite pure.
He cuts corners, thinking it doesn’t matter as long as you have the same result.
For Kim, there’s a lot of similarities there, but she’s playing a different game.
She knows she knows what’s wrong, but she’s struggling.
She struggles with the execution of it.
Like someone getting kicked out of their house.
So what does it mean to play by the rules after a while?
How much illumination on Kim and Jimmy’s relationship will there be in the finale?
The depths of how complex this relationship is and how deep it runs with both of them is illuminated.
Oh, there’s still more coming!
[Laughs] There’s still a lot of really big ones going.
It’s so much fun as an actor trying to keep up with Kim.
And revealing things that I thought were there and discovering other ones that I hadn’t considered.
But in this case, no, the surprises arent done, not for any of us.
What is one final cryptic clue that it’s possible for you to drop about Kim in the finale?
The fear and the worry that people have for Kim and what’s happening to her is merited.
