Karolina Wydra On Her Triumphant Return To Acting With ‘Pluribus’: “I Wasn’t Sure How I Would Ever Come Back When I Was Ready”

Growing up in Soviet-era and sparsely populated Opole, Poland, actress Karolina Wydra recalls a childhood of paucity when it came to recreation: There simply wasn’t much to do in her small village — except on the monthly occasions residents would gather to watch bootleg videos of American imports, which were pirated by samaritans recording theatrical screens with handheld cameras. Particularly impressionable to her at the time were Dirty Dancing (spurring her to take ballroom dancing lessons) and Prince’s Purple Rain — both projected on a simple white sheet in a makeshift viewing room.

“Everything was very controlled and theater — there wasn’t much of any of it — but if I could get in a play in school, I would, and I used to represent my school for reciting poetry; that was a big thing,” Wydra, who now counts Jennifer Grey a friend, tells Deadline.

A self-described “daydreamer” and Pisces (when I tell her I have two in my immediate family, she says, “Oh, Lord, God bless you. Oof — a lot of feelings”), Wydra has been a lifelong “lover of this medium. I always loved acting. I love what it did to me, how it transported me into this fantasy world, and it made me forget my life for a little bit.”

After her family emigrated to the U.S., Wydra’s forayed into the entertainment industry in the late ‘90s as a model, gracing the cover of German Elle and being featured in major ad campaigns, including a notable 2006 appearance opposite George Clooney in a sultry TV spot for Nespresso. While living in New York in her 20s, she was an “avid theater goer” and studied drama; calling it her favorite medium today, she finds the performance process “incredibly healing.”

She has been acting for the better part of three decades, scooping up roles in film (Crazy, Stupid, Love) and TV (House, True Blood, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and working with heavyweights like Graham Yost (Justified, Sneaky Pete) and the late David Lynch (Twin Peaks). But her “dream,” she says, was to work with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.

“I walked away to have children. It was very important. It was a scary decision, and it was a scary decision when your agent and your manager decides [sic] that they don’t want to represent you because you’re taking a long break, a long pause,” she recalls. “It was right after COVID, and the business was changing, things were changing. I was a 40-year-old woman, and so I wasn’t sure how I would ever come back when I was ready.”

Fast forward several years, she received an audition request from the To many casting team, which had reached out to her former commercial agent; Wydra was no longer working with the agency, but had remained on its roster. She went in blind, and remembers hesitating to even try: What if she auditioned, got close to realizing something she truly wanted, and it didn’t pan out?

She was cast in March 2024.

“To be on this journey and how it unfolded and how it all happened, I’m still pinching myself,” she says. “Am I getting punked? Where are the cameras and somebody going, ‘I was just kidding?’”

To craft Zosia — the hive mind emissary sent by the Others to communicate with Rhea Seehorn’s survivor, the cantankerous author Carol — Wydra relied on tried-and-true acting techniques like dreamwork, leaning on a coach who studied under famed teacher Sandra Seacat. She meditated and used Jungian techniques like active imagination to have “conversations with images” in her subconscious and channel “a different vibration … where you really leave the body, you tap into this energy where you feel this Zen-like state and true, unconditional love for humanity, and this peace.”

The goal was to embody the “content and happy,” “unflappable” creatures that compose the group, joined at the beginning of Season 1 by an extraterrestrial virus.

To create the “serenity that [Zosia] embodies,” Wydra also engaged in physical techniques to relax her body “because this character doesn’t have tension. She’s not a robot, she’s a human being, but she doesn’t experience nerves. They’re not afraid; this new world is not afraid. They don’t feel pain. They have a memory of what it was like to be in pain, but they’re not in pain. They’re not angry. They have the memory of it. So everything is a memory, but they don’t experience it in this new world. So doing whatever I could to be in that state. And those are the challenges in the first few days of shooting: When you feel nervous. You’re like, ‘Well, let me give it to the character.’ It’s like, ‘Well, not to this one.’”

Wydra remembers additional challenges while working with Gilligan to fine-tune Zosia’s mental state in the show: “There [were] moments where I would have so much empathy for what Rhea was going through. And he would say, ‘You can’t go on that journey with her.’ And it was really hard sometimes; you just felt like, ‘But she really looks like she’s suffering, and I have a lot of feelings about that.’”

As the first season of the Apple TV sci-fi dramedy progresses, Zosia shifts from maternal figure to friend to lover. Wydra says she believes being a mom helped her tap into the “unconditional love and understanding” the character embodies — the way a mother gives her child medicine if they’re sick even if they don’t want it. “But is it manipulative to get them to take it? You know what’s best for them, right?” she questions, adding that it’s a “fine line” between care and deception.

Despite the Others’ inability to lie or act with supposed malice, their supreme emotional and intellectual intelligence can certainly be read as calculating; every action is poised to accommodate or placate Carol, both a loving gesture as well as 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 mind having access to her frozen eggs — were played and shot “many, many, many different ways.”

The lattermost sequence took a while, with Wydra and Seehorn’s sides each taking a day of filming to complete. Wydra credits finale director and co-writer Gordon Smith for bringing flexibility to the shoot, and praises Gilligan’s approach of taking a scene “‘til it breaks” to see “where it lands.” There were takes that were more maternal, more empathetic and more cautious.

“Some of it would be a lot more emotional and a lot more heartfelt, and it came off more manipulative,” Wydra says of the final result.

Online, some drew parallels between the heartwrenching moment, which muddies up notions of consent, to an earlier scene in the series, where Carol reveals her mother sent her to conversion therapy camp. While the connection between the two wasn’t necessarily established behind the scenes, Wydra says that interpretation “totally makes sense.”

“When anybody thinks they know better than you, game over, right? You taking somebody’s will — it can be quite scary. What the character goes through, the conversion therapy, that was hard for us to film, because the fact that that stuff happens, it’s just truly heartbreaking. So we had a lot of conversations about that scene,” she says.

That said, another tidbit fans have latched onto is theorizing about Zosia’s past, something Carol herself breaches when she asks about previous romantic partners. Zosia seems to deliberately obfuscate who she was before, only offering that her pre-Joining significant other is no longer alive.

As for theories on whether the Zosia from before is straight, Wydra can’t say: “That was the thing that I didn’t want to know from Vince was who Zosia was prior, just because to create her today, I didn’t want the past to influence who she is today, because we don’t meet the Zosia prior.”

Admittedly, Wydra — like Seehorn — stays offline when it comes to the show: “I read very little because I’m way too sensitive and too fragile. As much as I want to be that person — ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks’ — it’s hard not to.” (I assure her I’ve only seen positive reception to her portrayal.)

She adds, “I do feel protective of Zosia because I had to work on all that stuff, and I had to really believe in it. [The Others] do love her. They genuinely, truly — Zosia loves her, truly loves her, and she loves her unconditionally, and she wants nothing but to make her happy.”

Ultimately, the conclusion of Season 1 positions Zosia and Carol firmly on opposing sides, as the latter’s last-ditch effort to succumb to her relationship with the Others is blown up when she finds out they are on track to turn her within the next couple of months. Dejected and embittered, Carol returns to her unlikely ally Manousos (Carlos-Manuel Vesga) to begrudgingly save the world. Oh, and she’s brought with her a Plan B, or rather A — as in: atom bomb.

“Even when I read it, I went — excuse my language — ‘What the fuck?’” Wydra says.

Despite how unforgivable the hive mind’s actions are, Carol and Zosia share a piercing look — of sorrow, of regret — when they part ways.

“I think the look is also like, ‘Are you sure? Is this what you really want?’ That moment that you have between people [where] you go: ‘Is this it? Is there still a chance, maybe hope?’” Wydra explains. “We did it many different ways, and what that means for everybody: for her, for me, and, I mean, for the world.”

Gilligan is already deep in Season 2 prep, with the writers’ room breaking the next installment. While Wydra is happy to cheer on her co-star Seehorn, who won her category at the Golden Globes (the actress sent the Better Call Saul alumna a video of a family viewing party featuring her husband, two kids and other young children chanting her name), she is “dying” to be back on set again.

“I have no idea what Season 2 brings, and I’m really excited to find out,” she says. “I can’t wait. I’m like, ‘Vince, can you write a little faster?’”