That seems like a lot to carry, given that Saul is one of the most critically acclaimed series on television. But if it is, Seehorn, 50, who has been acting on screens and on stages since the 1990s, handles it gracefully. Unlike the tight-lipped, inscrutable Kim, Seehorn isn’t afraid to be vulnerable, either professionally or, as it turns out, in conversation. She has no problem, for example, talking at length about a rash. She is funny and has a blinding, unguarded smile that made me wonder if I had ever actually seen Kim Wexler’s teeth (all those tooth-brushing scenes notwithstanding).

“Kim would think I was a giant dork,” she said. “She would not hang out with me at all.”

Still, there was something Kim-like beneath the dorkiness. Several times during our conversations, she acknowledged feeling as if she were getting away with something, as if all the colleagues, critics and Emmys forecasters must be lying. She wasn’t breaking rules. But like Kim, she fought back a nagging fear, she said, that someday, somehow, she was going to be found out.

“I feel like I walk around in the world and pretend to be a normal person,” she said. “And I’m not.”

Seehorn grew up much differently from Kim, who was essentially homeless as a child, with a grifter mother. But there was enough dislocation in the early life of Seehorn, who was born in Norfolk, Virginia, that it seems no accident she has proved so adept at inhabiting the character.

Seehorn’s family moved a lot because of her father’s job in counterintelligence, doing stints in Japan and Arizona before settling in Virginia Beach when Rhea was in elementary school.

“She was universally liked,” said Trish Goodwin, one of her best friends since childhood. “She was smart, and she did her work, but she wasn’t an annoying brainiac.”

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When Seehorn was 12, her parents split, and around that time she started going by her middle name, Rhea (pronounced: RAY; her first name is Deborah). Her mother had done musical theatre in high school, but Seehorn was more drawn to the passions of her father, a Vietnam War veteran who loved drawing and painting.

It was while pursuing studio art at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, that she discovered acting, in an elective class. She didn’t change her major, but she dived right in. “I think ignorance was bliss,” she said. “Because it seemed very simple to me at the time in a way that I understand now that it’s not.”

In Hollywood, where Seehorn moved in 2002, producers sometimes asked her in auditions to be more feminine, more likable, more like what they expected from a pretty blonde. She ignored those notes as best she could – her heroes were Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner, Gena Rowlands – and found plenty of regular work anyway, often in short-lived sitcoms. She was grateful but restless.

One day, after failing to land a part in the Amazon series Sneaky Pete, she was walking through the Sony Pictures Studios lot, and she saw the famous meth lab RV from Breaking Bad.

“In my head, I was like, I miss that type of storytelling where you really have to dig deep,” she said. The next day, Sharon Bialy, who was the casting director for Sneaky Pete, rang her up. There was a Breaking Bad spin off in the works, and she thought Seehorn would be perfect.

“A lot of people pigeonholed her in the industry as a comedy actress,” Bialy said. “But I had an instinct that she was so much more than that.”

Odenkirk said he and Seehorn had connected instantly. “I think she’s rolled with the punches her whole life,” he said. Instead of letting it make her into “a cowering, delicate person,” he added, “she’s tough, and she bounces back, and she’s fun.”

That toughness has found its way into Saul. Gould said it was evident from the beginning what Seehorn could bring to the role. “There wasn’t even a remote second choice,” he said. But as the character grew, he added, Seehorn’s specific qualities informed Kim’s evolution – and by extension, the story’s. “If we had not cast Rhea Seehorn in this role,” Gould said, “we would be talking about a very different show right now.”

It’s hard to imagine much fun awaits Kim in an arc that, as viewers know, seems bent toward tragedy. Seehorn was tight-lipped about Kim’s fate in the final stretch but not about her experience making it.

“The next six episodes, this whole season, was probably the most challenging work I’ve done in my career – but blissfully so,” she said in a follow-up phone conversation. “My last day, I left the set, and I just thought, ‘I’m going to be thinking about that ending for a very, very long time.’ ”

When Seehorn and I first met, at the Getty Center, one of the first things she offered was a disclaimer: “I’m not very good at playing me.” She said it laughingly, in what came to seem like a reliably self-deprecating manner, a reflex pointed out by several of her friends and colleagues. I took it under advisement then, but after spending some time with her, I’m not so sure.

By most measures of success – career, friendship, family – Seehorn has found it. She is engaged and seems to enjoy helping raise her fiance’s two boys. Odenkirk, as Variety reported in a recent cover story on Seehorn, hopes to cast her in a coming mockumentary he created with his Mr. Show partner, David Cross.

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It seemed to me that such successes were the result of a person’s playing herself pretty well. Odenkirk appeared to agree.

“She doesn’t know how great she is,” he said. “She doesn’t give her herself enough credit, but she shows what she can do, and hopefully she knows that.”