Rising up in Soviet-era and sparsely populated Opole, Poland, actress Karolina Wydra recollects a childhood of paucity when it got here to recreation: There merely wasn’t a lot to do in her small village — besides on the month-to-month events residents would collect to look at bootleg movies of American imports, which have been pirated by samaritans recording theatrical screens with handheld cameras. Notably impressionable to her on the time have been Soiled Dancing (spurring her to take ballroom dancing classes) and Prince’s Purple Rain — each projected on a easy white sheet in a makeshift viewing room.
“Every part was very managed and theater — there wasn’t a lot of any of it — but when I might get in a play at school, I’d, and I used to symbolize my college for reciting poetry; that was an enormous factor,” Wydra, who now counts Jennifer Gray a buddy, tells Deadline.
A self-described “daydreamer” and Pisces (once I inform her I’ve two in my quick household, she says, “Oh, Lord, God bless you. Oof — numerous emotions”), Wydra has been a lifelong “lover of this medium. I at all times beloved appearing. I like what it did to me, the way it transported me into this fantasy world, and it made me overlook my life for slightly bit.”
After her household emigrated to the U.S., Wydra’s forayed into the leisure trade within the late ‘90s as a mannequin, gracing the quilt of German Elle and being featured in main advert campaigns, together with a notable 2006 look reverse George Clooney in a sultry TV spot for Nespresso. Whereas dwelling in New York in her 20s, she was an “avid theater goer” and studied drama; calling it her favourite medium as we speak, she finds the efficiency course of “extremely therapeutic.”
She has been appearing for the higher a part of three many years, scooping up roles in movie (Loopy, Silly, Love) and TV (Home, True Blood, Brokers of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and dealing with heavyweights like Graham Yost (Justified, Sneaky Pete) and the late David Lynch (Twin Peaks). However her “dream,” she says, was to work with Breaking Unhealthy creator Vince Gilligan.
“I walked away to have youngsters. It was crucial. It was a scary determination, and it was a scary determination when your agent and your supervisor decides [sic] that they don’t wish to symbolize you since you’re taking a protracted break, a protracted pause,” she recollects. “It was proper after COVID, and the enterprise was altering, issues have been altering. I used to be a 40-year-old lady, and so I wasn’t certain how I’d ever come again once I was prepared.”
Quick ahead a number of years, she obtained an audition request from the Pluribus casting workforce, which had reached out to her former business agent; Wydra was now not working with the company, however had remained on its roster. She went in blind, and remembers hesitating to even attempt: What if she auditioned, acquired near realizing one thing she really needed, and it didn’t pan out?
Karolina Wydra as Zosia in ‘Pluribus’ (Apple TV)
She was solid in March 2024.
“To be on this journey and the way it unfolded and the way it all occurred, I’m nonetheless pinching myself,” she says. “Am I getting punked? The place are the cameras and anyone going, ‘I used to be simply kidding?’”
To craft Zosia — the hive thoughts emissary despatched by the Others to speak with Rhea Seehorn’s survivor, the cantankerous creator Carol — Wydra relied on tried-and-true appearing strategies like dreamwork, leaning on a coach who studied beneath famed trainer Sandra Seacat. She meditated and used Jungian strategies like energetic creativeness to have “conversations with photographs” in her unconscious and channel “a special vibration … the place you actually go away the physique, you faucet into this power the place you’re feeling this Zen-like state and true, unconditional love for humanity, and this peace.”
The aim was to embody the “content material and completely happy,” “unflappable” creatures that compose the group, joined firstly of Season 1 by an extraterrestrial virus.
(L-R): Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, Karolina Wydra as Zosia in ‘Pluribus’ (Apple TV)
To create the “serenity that [Zosia] embodies,” Wydra additionally engaged in bodily strategies to calm down her physique “as a result of this character doesn’t have pressure. She’s not a robotic, she’s a human being, however she doesn’t expertise nerves. They’re not afraid; this new world shouldn’t be afraid. They don’t really feel ache. They’ve a reminiscence of what it was prefer to be in ache, however they’re not in ache. They’re not indignant. They’ve the reminiscence of it. So the whole lot is a reminiscence, however they don’t expertise it on this new world. So doing no matter I might to be in that state. And people are the challenges within the first few days of capturing: Once you really feel nervous. You’re like, ‘Effectively, let me give it to the character.’ It’s like, ‘Effectively, to not this one.’”
Wydra remembers further challenges whereas working with Gilligan to fine-tune Zosia’s psychological state within the present: “There [were] moments the place I’d have a lot empathy for what Rhea was going via. And he would say, ‘You’ll be able to’t go on that journey together with her.’ And it was actually onerous generally; you simply felt like, ‘However she actually appears to be like like she’s struggling, and I’ve numerous emotions about that.’”
As the primary season of the Apple TV sci-fi dramedy progresses, Zosia shifts from maternal determine to buddy to lover. Wydra says she believes being a mother helped her faucet into the “unconditional love and understanding” the character embodies — the best way a mom offers her youngster medication in the event that they’re sick even when they don’t need it. “However is it manipulative to get them to take it? You understand what’s finest for them, proper?” she questions, including that it’s a “wonderful line” between care and deception.
Regardless of the Others’ lack of ability to lie or act with supposed malice, their supreme emotional and mental intelligence can actually be learn as calculating; each motion is poised to accommodate or placate Carol, each a loving gesture in addition to a deeply exploitative one. As such, key scenes — like Zosia’s reunion with Carol, their first kiss and even the bombshell reveal of the hive thoughts getting access to her frozen eggs — have been performed and shot “many, many, many various methods.”
The lattermost sequence took some time, with Wydra and Seehorn’s sides every taking a day of filming to finish. Wydra credit finale director and co-writer Gordon Smith for bringing flexibility to the shoot, and praises Gilligan’s strategy of taking a scene “‘til it breaks” to see “the place it lands.” There have been takes that have been extra maternal, extra empathetic and extra cautious.
“A few of it could be much more emotional and much more heartfelt, and it got here off extra manipulative,” Wydra says of the ultimate consequence.
(L-R): Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, Karolina Wydra as Zosia in ‘Pluribus’ (Apple TV)
On-line, some drew parallels between the heartwrenching second, which muddies up notions of consent, to an earlier scene within the collection, the place Carol reveals her mom despatched her to conversion remedy camp. Whereas the connection between the 2 wasn’t essentially established behind the scenes, Wydra says that interpretation “completely is smart.”
“When anyone thinks they know higher than you, recreation over, proper? You taking anyone’s will — it may be fairly scary. What the character goes via, the conversion remedy, that was onerous for us to movie, as a result of the truth that that stuff occurs, it’s simply really heartbreaking. So we had numerous conversations about that scene,” she says.
That stated, one other tidbit followers have latched onto is theorizing about Zosia’s previous, one thing Carol herself breaches when she asks about earlier romantic companions. Zosia appears to intentionally obfuscate who she was earlier than, solely providing that her pre-Becoming a member of important different is now not alive.
As for theories on whether or not the Zosia from earlier than is straight, Wydra can’t say: “That was the factor that I didn’t wish to know from Vince was who Zosia was prior, simply because to create her as we speak, I didn’t need the previous to affect who she is as we speak, as a result of we don’t meet the Zosia prior.”
Admittedly, Wydra — like Seehorn — stays offline in the case of the present: “I learn little or no as a result of I’m approach too delicate and too fragile. As a lot as I wish to be that particular person — ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks’ — it’s onerous to not.” (I guarantee her I’ve solely seen optimistic reception to her portrayal.)
She provides, “I do really feel protecting of Zosia as a result of I needed to work on all that stuff, and I needed to actually consider in it. [The Others] do love her. They genuinely, really — Zosia loves her, really loves her, and she or he loves her unconditionally, and she or he needs nothing however to make her completely happy.”
(L-R): Rhea Seehorn as Carol Sturka, Karolina Wydra as Zosia in ‘Pluribus’ (Apple TV)
In the end, the conclusion of Season 1 positions Zosia and Carol firmly on opposing sides, because the latter’s last-ditch effort to succumb to her relationship with the Others is blown up when she finds out they’re on observe to show her throughout the subsequent couple of months. Dejected and embittered, Carol returns to her unlikely ally Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) to begrudgingly save the world. Oh, and she or he’s introduced together with her a Plan B, or somewhat A — as in: atom bomb.
“Even once I learn it, I went — excuse my language — ‘What the fuck?’” Wydra says.
Regardless of how unforgivable the hive thoughts’s actions are, Carol and Zosia share a piercing look — of sorrow, of remorse — once they half methods.
“I believe the look can be like, ‘Are you certain? Is that this what you really need?’ That second that you’ve between folks [where] you go: ‘Is that this it? Is there nonetheless an opportunity, possibly hope?’” Wydra explains. “We did it many various methods, and what meaning for everyone: for her, for me, and, I imply, for the world.”
Gilligan is already deep in Season 2 prep, with the writers’ room breaking the subsequent installment. Whereas Wydra is completely happy to cheer on her co-star Seehorn, who received her class on the Golden Globes (the actress despatched the Higher Name Saul alumna a video of a household viewing get together that includes her husband, two youngsters and different younger youngsters chanting her identify), she is “dying” to be again on set once more.
“I do not know what Season 2 brings, and I’m actually excited to seek out out,” she says. “I can’t wait. I’m like, ‘Vince, are you able to write slightly sooner?’”
