By EJ Panaligan
“Better Caul Saul” actors Patrick Fabian, Bob Odenkirk, Tony Dalton, Rhea Seehorn and director Thomas Schnauz dove into the details about that shocking death scene in the “Plan and Execution” from the show’s final season. Talking to Michael Schneider for Variety‘s Making a Scene, presented by HBO, the cast and crew were full of helpful tidbits on the best way to die on camera. Warning, spoilers for “Saul” ahead.
“If you’re gonna die, don’t die with your mouth open, okay?” Fabian said of his Howard character’s death scene. “Because it’ll come back to bite you in the ass.”
Fabian also shared that he knew his character was going to die before shooting for the season began: “They called me to just say, ‘So, we’ve come up with a really cool thing for Howard, but what it means is that we’re probably not going to need your services past August this season.'”
“As the director, I had all these different shots of Bob’s eyeball, all these different angles…. and it just was not working,” Schnauz said of the editing process for the scene. “We found that the simpler version of [Lalo’s] shadow coming behind Patrick Fabian and Bob’s reaction was enough to sell the fear.”
“I was kind of just off on the sidelines in the first half of the last season,” Dalton said of his Lalo character committing the killing in the pivotal scene. “So to just jump in there and go into their apartment to shoot Howard in the head was, wow, it was just insane.”
Odenkirk talked at length about Jimmy and Kim’s actions catching up to them: “Frankly, I had been waiting for this scene for a while. There’s always consequences in this world of ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul,’ and I’ve been waiting and hoping and wanting for there to be consequences for these characters.”
Seehorn, revealed the process with Odenkirk of nailing their characters’ reaction shots: “We wanted it to be a little messy… We really wanted to hammer home that these need to be people that have not seen that kind of violence.”
Watch the full “Making A Scene” video above.