‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6: Patrick Fabian and Michael Mando on Saying Goodbye
Patrick Fabian and Michael Mando of ‘Better Call Saul’ talk about what makes the show and their characters so special.
When Better Call Saul begins its sixth and final season Monday, April 18 at 9 pm ET on AMC, the riveting origin story of Walter White’s gabby lawyer Saul Goodman will have outlasted Breaking Bad’s award-winning run, an impressive feat that most television series can’t match – let alone a spinoff. For every behemoth like ER (15 seasons), there are dozens of one-offs like Freaks and Geeks or My So-Called Life. Would creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have struck gold twice without actor/comedian/writer Bob Odenkirk anchoring an ensemble that can turn even a drawn-out class-action lawsuit involving a retirement home into bingeable television? Simply, nope.
For most of the actors, this once-in-a-lifetime job stands as the longest-held gig in their entire careers. Which makes saying goodbye all the more devastating. This cast has been through some things together – especially in the last two years with a pandemic and Odenkirk suffering a near-fatal heart attack on-set delaying production on the final season.
“I got lucky. I got six seasons out of a television show and yet, I’ve befallen all the same pitfalls of every actor before me: Oh, it’s gonna go on forever; you’ll always have this job. You can spend this money now because there’s an endless supply of it,” Patrick Fabian, who plays Howard Hamlin, the uptight law partner of Chuck McGill at HHM, told Sling TV in an interview.
“You can mentally prepare for the fact that you’re not gonna drive on the lot anymore or you’re not gonna fly back to Alburquerque, but until you realize, I’m not driving on the lot anymore, I’m not flying back to Alburquerque anymore, you get that quiet isolation of sadness. But we’re showpeople, right? ‘See ya on the next one. See ya on the next set. Buck up!’ But, it hurts. It’s wounding, because it’s family and I love them all.”
Fabian, Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, who plays Kim Wexler, even lived together for three years in a house in New Mexico during filming. “I’m gonna miss that. You only go to college once, right? And you might have a reunion, but it’s not the same,” Fabian laments. “That’s the thing that all of the sudden dawns on you - that the story has ended and this chapter is done, and it’s time for us to move on to our next lives and our next projects. So, we’ll get together, but we’ll never get together again like that.”
Michael Mando, who plays the reluctant Salamanca drug cartel member Nacho Varga, takes a more Zen approach to walking away from “the role of my life.”
“It’s a part of life. All good things come to an end,” he says. “To end on the highest note, to end on the greatest season that we’ve ever done is the way to go. I can’t wait for the world to see what we’ve done. We’ve poured our hearts and souls into it.”
And this season has a lot of loose ends to tie up. The biggest question centers around the fate of Saul/Jimmy McGill’s longtime colleague and current wife Kim, who never appears (or is even referenced) in Breaking Bad. Most scenes featuring Seehorn carry with them a sense of dread either at her potential doom at the hands of the Salamancas now that she’s in the cartel’s crosshairs, or a blowout breakup of the difficult, yet rich love story at the show’s core.
Nacho’s whereabouts by the end of the series are also cause for concern after Lalo Salmanca (Tony Dalton) miraculously survives the hit he helped arrange with rival Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). Mando won’t divulge any details on the trajectory of Nacho’s story lest he incur the wrath of the spoiler police, but he’ll offer up this: “You’re gonna get to understand how big his heart is and how badly he wants to break good. He’s trying to do the right thing, and we’re really gonna get a sense of who he is and what he’s about and what he’s willing to stand for and how far he’s willing to go.”
This dedication to at least trying to live virtuously is a character trait Mando wishes he saw more of on TV.
“I love the fact that Nacho is really serious and means it, about not turning into the dark side,” he says. “I think a lot of characters [are] always drawn to flirting with the dark side and not totally honest about wanting to break good, but I think to play a character that truly has that integrity of wanting to do the right thing is the thing that I love the most about this character.”
Unlike Nacho, the motivation to do the right thing often eludes the titular character. Thanks to the black-and-white scenes opening many Better Call Saul episodes depicting the sullen, mundane existence of Saul/Jimmy’s post-Breaking Bad timeline personna, we know he’s managing a Cinnabon in a mall in Omaha as a mustachioed man named Gene. How long can he keep up this charade, especially since an obnoxious cab driver passing through the shopping center recognized him from the commercials and park benches that once littered Alburquerque with his face front and center? We can only hope it’s all good, man.
Better Call Saul premieres Monday, April 18 at 9 pm ET on AMC. Use the link below to subscribe to Sling Orange + Blue with AMC.