Steven Prusakowski
Being pleasant is not always easy. This is especially true when playing a character who exists inside a collective hive mind and could easily come across as robotic, detached, or entirely stripped of humanity. Yet on Apple TV+’s Pluribus, Karolina Wydra does the opposite – and she does it exceptionally. As she attempts to allure Carol (Rhea Seehorn), one of the final handful of human holdouts resisting the extraterrestrial Joining, Wydra injects real warmth and calculated serenity into Zosia. She deftly avoids the pitfalls that a lesser actor could fall into. But, behind her warm eyes, we witness much more churning, turning Zosia into the walking embodiment of billions on two feet.
When Wydra first read the script, her first instinct was that a baseline, serene pleasantness simply did not fit who Zosia truly was. As she began to unpack the role, she discovered that this surface-level sweetness was actually a highly complex, calculated mask. The character presents herself as exceptionally pleasant, but as the audience quickly learns, we still do not have the answers to what lies beneath that calm exterior.
Wydra joined me on the TV Topics Podcast to discuss her work on Pluribus and the television she loves. She was willing to go into great detail about working on the series, but she was not interested in providing answers to the show’s many mysteries, instead finding joy in others being captivated by the series. (Listen to the full, fascinating conversation below.)
“To see people really enjoy it and have such fun with their interpretation of what it means has been truly such an honor and it’s been so so beautiful to watch.”
What she said there speaks volumes to the strengths of the series. There is so much to dig into and dissect, and the themes it touches upon can be analyzed, questioned, and enjoyed. Wydra does not seem to be in a rush to find the answers, but more interested in embracing the now of it all.
When she first auditioned, Wydra knew only the bare minimum about the world TV genius Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) had constructed. It was only after landing the role that she truly dissected all the rules her character exists under. According to the show, those who join the hive mind retain their physical individuality while surrendering their negative aspects. Every single member reacts to the environment in perfect, synchronous harmony, sharing the experiences and knowledge of the others. While there are advantages to the shared knowledge, there’s something to filling in those gaps on our own. The series is a fine example.
“It is a journey,” stated Wydra. “Now it is often about instant gratification…. when it’s about the journey. It’s about right here, right now.”
Even though her character is part of the collective hive mind called “The Others” where everyone thinks and act as one, Wydra still manages to work a subtle human individuality into the performance. As an actress, this presented her with a challenge unlike any she had taken on before: the inability to rely on her creative instincts or draw on all of life experiences. Since Zosia does not experience standard human emotions, Wydra could not look into her own history of grief or joy to find her way into a scene. She had to build an entirely new physical and emotional framework from scratch, operating inside a collective psychology that acts as one entity. You witness it in every frame that Wydra shares on screen with Seehorn. While Seehorn has moments where she plays Carol big, loud, and combatant, Wydra’s reactions are precise, restrained, and deliberate, expressing so much with so little.
“Vince said they’re very happy, they’re joyous, content, unflappable, and they’re fully fledged human beings, they’re not robots but they’re altered,” Wydra explained. “Because they don’t have memories of anything that’s negative as far as fear, grief, anger, they don’t feel it but they have a memory of like ‘Oh yeah I remember I felt that way but they don’t feel it in their being,’”
To make Zosia much more than a kind face staring back at Carol (Rhea Seehorn) and to make her overall existence believable, Wydra had to track her on-screen partner with extreme precision. Every single step, look, and breath had to be calculated based on the collective attempt to “read the room” when interacting with Carol.
“Everything is very calculated, how close I come to her, when do I sit down, when does my physicality gets a lot more comfortable. Where like we’re talking right now, there’s a comfort between you and me but because you’re inviting me to do that, you’re engaging with me to invite me to do that…” explained Wydra. “…Carol was like ‘Fuck off you’re not even going to come near me!’”
“And so for us, so we don’t scare her off, because we need her, we have to always calculate because they have the greatest psychologists in the world that study behavior so I’m always studying her behavior to go when can I come in when have to pull back how close do I get how far away do I have to get from her when can I sit down.”
Since Gilligan kept his direction simple, Wydra felt a big responsibility to create Zosia in a way that would stay in tune with his vision. She treats the craft with an old-school reverence, utilizing dream work and deep subconscious script analysis to build her roles from the inside out, allowing her to build all the things Zosia is piece by piece.
What makes her presence in Pluribus even more miraculous is the improbable story of how she was picked for the show in the first place. Wydra had completely stepped away from Hollywood for five years to raise her children. She had no agent, no manager, and no presence in the industry. She was completely off the radar. How she appeared in the running after the long absence was all by chance.
“They searched for my character high and low from all over the world and they couldn’t find her,” Wydra shared. “Casting went through their cabinet next to their office with handwritten notes on every actor they’ve ever seen. They literally had to go in there and look through their papers and look for actresses. Russell came upon my picture and he went ‘Whatever happened to this girl?’” she recalled. “Because when I took a break for 5 years, I was dropped by my agent and manager, so I wouldn’t have the opportunity to read for this role. Russell was like ‘Whatever happened to her?’ And that’s how I got the audition. They reached out, they found me and they figured out a way to get in touch with me to read for this role.”
It was quite the stroke of luck and a bizarre coincidence for an actress who revealed during our conversation that she credits Vince Gilligan’s masterpiece Breaking Bad to be her literal introduction to television. Prior to watching the series, cinema was her religion, spending her youth in New York geeking out over experimental Czech cinema. Back then, her television set was only used to watch movies.
Since Breaking Bad, which she became obsessed with, she watched Mad Men, followed by another series and another. Now she watches everything from The Traitors to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Pitt, Adolescence… even The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (no judgment).
When asked during our TV Topics portion of the conversation which legendary television character she would most want to play if given the chance, she didn’t hesitate for a single second, blurting out Walter White.
“I just think it’s such a rich character that has such an incredible journey of everything under the sun. It has all the drama. It has all the emotions. It has all the secrets. It has all the humor. It just has everything for me… everything.”
“The heaviness that he carries,” Wydra said passionately. “You have cancer, you’re fighting for your life, you’re fighting for your family, you put yourself at such tremendous risks… And at the end you find out it’s all for himself actually that he did this all because he wanted to, and then he gets caught up in the game and the nuances of all the intricacy intricacies that he goes through throughout all these five seasons. I mean it’s everything you would want as an actor, it’s so juicy you know.”
The sheer contrast between Zosia’s serene, calculated exterior and Wydra’s burning desire to play a ruthless methamphetamine kingpin proves just how deep her artistic reservoir runs. The actress lives a life of deep appreciation and gratitude, a perspective that was profoundly shaped after surviving a major health scare. It shifted her entire worldview, instilling a deep gratefulness which mirrors the present-moment artistic journey she took with creating Zosia. Rather than rushing through life or searching for instant gratification, she approaches it with a patient mindfulness, taking it all in and avoiding going on autopilot.
With season one of Pluribus in the books, behind Zosia’s eyes remains a lingering source of beautiful ambiguity, a promise of more story to be told, more of the character to explore. While we still do not have the answers to what Zosia truly wants or where the collective consciousness will ultimately lead, watching Wydra bring this complex character to life is one of the best journeys currently on television.
Watch Karolina Wydra in Pluribus now streaming on Apple TV+, and make sure to follow me on Instagram @TV_Topics for more exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews.
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