She stole scenes in ‘Better Call Saul.’ In her new show, she’s the star.

NEW YORK — Rhea Seehorn takes a minute to think about it.

Has she been underestimated? The 53-year-old actress tilts her head, takes a bite of scrambled egg and ponders the notion. “I’m not sure that I thought that,” Seehorn says on a rainy fall morning at the Crosby Bar in SoHo. She briefly entertains the idea before her humility shuts it down. “If I were to take ownership of that statement, it implies that I always thought I was better than what people were saying,” she muses. “That’s definitely not true.”

After heading to Hollywood two decades ago to star in “I’m With Her,” an ABC sitcom that lasted a single season, Seehorn booked bit parts, shot many a pilot and racked up laughs in the two-season NBC comedy “Whitney.” Yet meaty screen roles proved rare until “Better Call Saul” co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould cast Seehorn as Kim Wexler, the not-so-straitlaced lawyer who follows Bob Odenkirk’s con man Jimmy McGill down a slippery slope into the Albuquerque underworld.

D.C. theater veteran Holly Twyford acted alongside Seehorn in several stage productions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In her mind, it wasn’t until “Saul” premiered in 2015 on AMC that Hollywood unleashed Seehorn’s sprawling talents. “I already had seen it, as had many of us who are still here in this D.C. community,” Twyford explains. “But now everybody was seeing what she could do.” Even the creatives who rolled the dice on Seehorn were surprised. “When we hired her,” Gilligan says, “I didn’t know the deep toolbox of skills she possessed.”

By the time “Saul” concluded its acclaimed six-season run in 2022, the “Breaking Bad” spin-off had morphed from the Jimmy McGill show into more of a Jimmy-Kim double act. As the series wrapped up, Seehorn nabbed two Emmy nominations for her portrayal of a calculating attorney whose unresolved trauma, adrenaline-chasing mischief and haunting guilt added up to one of television’s most complex characters.

“She was put in these comedies, which she was fine in, but not even close to her skill level and her capabilities — and she was kind of stuck there,” Odenkirk says. “Hollywood is a f—ing a–hole sometimes. In that case, it was a great example of, like: What’s wrong with these people?”

When the Gilligan-created drama “Pluribus” premieres Friday on Apple TV, the high-concept series will mark Seehorn’s first major on-screen lead role. Her character, Carol Sturka, is a surly romance novelist who emerges from a global epidemic unscathed. The nature of this particular pox? Unadulterated happiness.

Sweeping in scope but razor-sharp in focus, “Pluribus” is a star vehicle engineered for Seehorn’s idiosyncratic talents. While Carol is not the perpetually in-control Kim — she’s outspoken and acerbic, with a mouth that tends to get her in hot water — there is some overlap. The repressed trauma. The fierce independence. The underlying intensity. Whether she’s playing Carol or Kim, science fiction or kitchen-sink realism, rage or waterworks, Seehorn commands the screen with a humanist quality sharpened over decades of perseverance.

“Rhea would say that when she was younger, people wouldn’t think she was a leading lady,” says Karolina Wydra, Seehorn’s “Pluribus” co-star. “That blows my mind, because you watch this, and you’re like, ‘You’re nothing but a leading lady.’”

Visiting Manhattan from Texas, where she’s been filming the hostage thriller “Eleven Days,” Seehorn exudes familiar warmth, matter-of-fact ease and, yes, deep-seated self-effacement during our early October breakfast. “If there’s a way for me to turn everything into ‘How am I the loser in this?’ I will,” she says. Later, Seehorn chuckles and second-guesses herself. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she cautions. “I wouldn’t write any of this.”

Born in Norfolk, Seehorn moved with her parents and younger sister to Japan and Arizona before spending most of her youth in Virginia Beach. (Her father’s counterintelligence career spun the family around the globe.) She was studying art at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, when she took acting as an elective, explored the regional theater scene and found herself enchanted by onstage storytelling. By the time Seehorn graduated, she was already volunteer ushering at the District’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre, reading stage directions in new play workshops and soliciting her onstage idols for advice.

“There were just so many brilliant actors working there, and I was just, like: ‘How do you make a living at this? I’ve got to do this for the rest of my life,’” Seehorn says. “I would sometimes go to people like Holly Twyford, and I would tell her: ‘I have $40. Would you do private coaching with me for one scene?’ She would say yes. Nancy Robinette would say yes. All these incredible people just taught me.”

Twyford remembers a tenacious self-starter who turned unremarkable parts into scene-stealers before coming into her own as a lead. “It was crystal clear from the get-go,” she says, “just how talented she was.”

Soon enough, Seehorn established herself as a D.C. theater stalwart while regularly appearing at Woolly, Arena Stage and Studio Theatre. Although Seehorn had her fair share of side hustles — she worked at Kemp Mill Music for years — she got by thanks to the life insurance payout that followed her father’s alcoholism-related death at 52. “As much as it’s horribly unfortunate how I got that money,” Seehorn says, “I was able to pay for my college in cash.”

After a dozen years in D.C., Seehorn moved to New York City and made her Broadway debut in a 2001 production of Neil Simon’s “45 Seconds From Broadway.” Soon after, she booked “I’m With Her” and relocated to Los Angeles. From that point, the television gigs proved steady enough — a bachelorette in the unaired comedy “The Singles Table,” an assistant district attorney in “Franklin & Bash,” a sardonic divorcée in “Whitney.” Whenever Seehorn tried landing weightier material, however, her comedic reputation proved difficult to shed.

“The industry definitely pigeonholes comedy people, and then additionally sitcom people — especially multi-camera — in a way that is absolutely unfair and unjustified,” Seehorn says. “I even did one audition for something [dramatic], and they really liked me, but the feedback was: ‘They’re just really worried about her being a comedic actress.’ I was like: ‘I just did the scene dramatically for you. Do you think on the day I’m going to show up with big red shoes and a ball nose?’”

When Gilligan and Gould cast Seehorn in “Better Call Saul,” the co-creators had one line of dialogue for Kim in the pilot and little idea of where the character would go. “Maybe she’ll be a love interest for Jimmy,” Gilligan remembers thinking. “Maybe she’s not. If she doesn’t work out, hell, Jimmy could get a new girlfriend.”

Instead, Seehorn’s on-screen range and offscreen empathy gave Kim unforeseen staying power. While Odenkirk hails Seehorn’s work ethic — her scripts, he notes, were always scribbled with annotations — he emphasizes that “she’s just one of the best people.”

“She made herself indispensable without even actively trying,” Gilligan says, “just by being the wonderful actor that she is and the wonderful human being she is.”

After Seehorn delivered her closing arguments on “Saul,” she felt compelled to find out what Gould and Gilligan were cooking up next. So she carved out time to sit down with the duo while they were in postproduction on “Saul’s” final episodes and probe their plans.

“Peter Gould said, ‘Well, I definitely hope to work with you again, but I really think Vince needs to say something,’” Seehorn recalls. “That’s when Vince said, ‘Well, I wrote something for you if you’re interested.’

“That made me laugh: ‘If you’re interested.’ And then I basically started crying.”

The concept for “Pluribus,” Gilligan says, came to him about a decade ago, when he imagined a man who suddenly finds all of humanity showering him with unconditional adoration. By the time he sketched out the series and penned the first episode, Gilligan had grown so fond of Seehorn that he reshaped his protagonist in her image.

“It’s a curveball,” Gilligan acknowledges. “I don’t think it’s what she expected, or what anyone expects from her. But I figured it was high time that she was number one on the call sheet.”

To truly explain “Pluribus” would be to rob Gilligan’s head trip of its enigmatic potency. (“My own family knows nothing about the show,” says Seehorn, who has a longtime partner and two sons from his previous marriage. “I have, like, nine pages of things I’m not allowed to say.”) But it’s safe to state that this dystopian — or is it utopian? — series poses Rorschachian questions about happiness, autonomy and the human condition.

Anchoring this thorny thought exercise is the jaded Carol, whose immunity spares her from the bliss infecting minds from Albuquerque to Italy. For Seehorn’s part, that meant taking on an isolated character whose largely internalized emotions suddenly burst to the surface. One example: a showcase scene early in the second episode, in which Seehorn distills Carol’s bottled-up confusion, anger and grief into one trembling tirade.

“I love that she’s unapologetically angry, and that is something in my real life that I suppress constantly,” Seehorn says. “When she is exposed to everything and it’s just raw nerves, she has almost no ability to just pull it together and go along with the flow.”

Seehorn has seized opportunities beyond the Gilliganverse in recent years, including a turn opposite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in 2024’s “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” and an Emmy-nominated performance in the short-form series “Cooper’s Bar.” So does this all mean Hollywood has, at last, started to give Seehorn her due?

“You cannot make that the headline — that Rhea thinks she was underestimated,” she blurts out through mortified laughter. “It’s going to make me seem like I think I’m awesome.”

After more than an hour of traversing her career’s ups and downs, Seehorn still seems allergic to the notion that she’s earned less acclaim and opportunity than she deserves. Mocking the idea, she breaks out her instrument, adopts an egotistical tenor and delivers an Emmy-worthy wisecrack.

“Finally,” Seehorn quips, “people can correctly estimate me.”