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Clayton Davis
Chief Awards Editor
byClaytonDavis See All
Apple TV The casting team for Vince Gilligan’s “Pluribus” had searched the world for the actor who could play the key character of Zosia. The alien “hive mind” sends Zosia to work with the resistor and rebel Carol (Rhea Seehorn) and must be beautiful, smart, calm and patient. It’s a tall order, and when they couldn’t find her, they went back to the cabinet.
The casting team behind every Gilligan series, from “Breaking Bad” to “Better Call Saul,” keeps a physical archive of handwritten notes on every actor who has ever auditioned for them. Months into the hunt, with their other resources exhausted, casting director Russell Scott pulled out an old folder and started flipping through it — stopping on Karolina Wydra. “He came upon my picture and went, ‘Let’s see her. Whatever happened to her?'” Wydra recalls. After giving birth to her son Atticus during the pandemic, the Polish-born actress, known to genre fans from HBO’s “True Blood” and Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” stepped away to be a stay-at-home mom. Her representation dropped her, and she had her second son. By the time she felt ready to return to work at 42, she had no agent, no manager, and no idea how to get back into the room. Then an audition request arrived through an old commercial agency that still had her on their roster. “I just saw it was Vince Gilligan, Apple TV, and literally my body went into utter shock,” Wydra says. “I wasn’t going to do it. And then there’s that other voice in me that said, ‘Give it a try. You have nothing to lose.'”
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