Dave Davies (3:04)

This is FRESH AIR weekend. I'm Dave Davies. My guest today, actor Michael Shannon has appeared in nearly 100 movies and television productions, perhaps best known for playing brooding, villainous or unhinged characters like like Agent Nelson van Alden in HBO's Boardwalk Empire. But Shannon's range is far broader, and his two latest projects find him playing real life historical characters engaged in noble pursuits. In the film Nuremberg, he plays the U.S. supreme Court justice who organized the international tribunal to try Nazi leaders for war crimes after the Second World War, serving as lead prosecutor in the ensuing trial. And in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, he's President James Garfield, who fought against corrupt Washington politicians for civil service reform before being assassinated only four months into office. Michael Shannon earned Oscar nominations for his performances in the films Revolutionary Road and Nocturnal Animals. He's also appeared in the films Take Shelter, Knives out, the Shape of Water and man of Steel, among many others, and in the Showtime series George and Tammy. He also formed an indie rock band and has collaborated with musician Jason Narduzzi in performing songs from several albums of the group R.E.M. we'll talk about that. Well, Michael Shannon, welcome back to FRESH air. It's been a while.

Michael Shannon (4:28)

Oh, it's my pleasure, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Dave Davies (4:30)

You know, you've had a lot of roles, and as I said in many of the better known ones, your characters are unhinged or villainous in these films. You play not just good guys, but, you know, real historical characters fighting battles to right wrongs, strengthen democracy. Do you think intentional to cast you in these roles?

Michael Shannon (4:48)

Oh, gosh, I don't know. So much of what has happened in my career just seems like dumb luck, you know, I don't know what got into these people's heads to look my way for these things, but I sure am grateful that they thought of me. You know, I mean, I guess typically with a project like Nuremberg, I think when people hear that I'm in Nuremberg, they assume I'm playing a Nazi. And and when they hear about Death by Lightning, they assume I'm playing the assassin. So I guess it's nice to surprise people.

Dave Davies (5:22)

All right. Well, you know, you play President James Garfield, as we mentioned in Death by Lightning, that's the Netflix series. He was elected in 1880. What drew you to this project?

Michael Shannon (5:34)

Well, it started with Candace's book, Destiny of the Republic.

Dave Davies (5:38)

Candice Millard. Yeah, she's been on our show. Terrific historian. Yeah.

Michael Shannon (5:42)

And for anybody who watches the program and gets a kick out of it, I highly suggest you read the book, if you haven't already, because it's very captivating and very informative and illuminating. But I find that a lot of people really don't know much about this period. It's kind of sandwiched between the Civil War and the World wars and the Depression, you know, which are all, I guess, more inherently dramatic periods. But I think this period is really worth studying and looking at because the country seemed very lost at sea, as Garfield hints at in his address at the Republican convention. And it's easy, I think, to feel that way now. So if you're curious about how we might get out of this quagmire we're currently in, it might behoove people to take a look at this period in our nation's history.

Dave Davies (6:50)

Yeah, and it's interesting because Garfield was kind of an accidental hero. I mean, he was initially going to nominate someone else for the presidency and the convention got deadlocked and people were so captivated by his speech, they turned to him. You know, I didn't remember anything about James Garfield. I'm sure most of us don't. But when I saw you in that suit and that big beard and, you know, that long coat and vest and bow tie, I thought, yes, that's the picture we've seen of James Garfield. Talk a little bit about physically occupying the character. Did you grow that big beard?

Michael Shannon (7:23)

I literally could not grow that beard. Even if you gave me five years, it wouldn't look anything like that. But we had such a brilliant team of hair and makeup and wardrobe, and they just, they do their magic, you know.

Dave Davies (7:44)

Well, I want to play a clip and to set this up. Garfield was a Republican, and the Republican party had been the dominant party in Washington for years, but it was a party beset by corruption. You know, patronage, employment, self dealing were kind of the rule of the day. There was no such thing as civil service, which Garfield was determined to change. And the scene we're going to listen to us where Garfield had been president a short time and his opponents within the party were blocking all of his cabinet appointments in the Senate because he refused to give these corrupt politicians the control of key federal jobs, especially the port collector in New York because that was a big center of money. And patronage. Anyway, in this scene, there's a bunch of senators and cabinet members gathered in the White House, and they're all arguing with each other because you, as Garfield, are determined to stick with this fight that they think he's never going to win. They think he should just give in and play ball with the machine. You've been listening quietly while they argue, and then you finally erupt with a stern message. Let's listen.

Michael Shannon (8:46)

Gentlemen. Harm yourselves this instant or I will expel you from this building for good. That includes you, Mr. Secretary. Now, I made a vow to end the rot in our government. Spoils, patronage. Call it what you want. It's no good. Do nothing. Siphoning taxpayer money for jobs that don't even exist. Elected officials brazenly peddling their influence at auctions. This is not how democracy endures. This is wrong, and all of us know it. This is our fight. One day, years from now, each one of us will be judged by what we do in this moment. How will they talk about us, I wonder?

Dave Davies (9:49)

And that's our guest, Michael Shannon, in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning. That's a powerful speech. You want to talk a little about that moment?

Michael Shannon (9:59)

You know, it's interesting. I know we're not talking about it right now, but it draws a comparison to something that Robert Jackson says in Nuremberg when he's talking to the Pope.

Dave Davies (10:10)

That's your character, right? Yeah.

Michael Shannon (10:11)

Yes. He tells the Pope, you know, you validated the Nazis, and how will you be remembered? And, you know, sometimes I wonder how much people are really concerned about how they're remembered, in a sense. Why would that be important? I mean, you're gone, right? But it's a shame that you have to appeal to people's ego to get them to do the right thing. It shouldn't really be ultimately because you're concerned about how you remembered. It should be more that you're concerned about the future of the next generation and the generation that follows. But if you can bend people at their ego, then you might as well take advantage of it, I guess.

Dave Davies (10:58)

So let's talk about Nuremberg. You play Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice who's the lead prosecutor in this trial, trying former Nazi leaders for their crimes. You know, people of a younger generation might not be as aware of this as you and I, but he also really kind of organized the whole thing. And I thought we'd hear a clip here. You, in this clip, are speaking with the army psychiatrist who has been sent to the prison where these captured Nazis are being held. His job is to keep them from committing suicide, for one. And then to pursue some combination of therapy and also building psychological profiles to assist in the prosecution. And in this scene, this is well before the trial gets underway, you're telling the psychiatrist you want him to get information from Hermann Goring, the highest ranking Nazi, about their defense strategy. And the psychiatrist is resisting. The psychiatrist he's played by Rami Malek speaks first.

Michael Shannon (11:54)

You want me to be a spy? I want you to do your duty for your country. No, you want me to break doctor patient confidentiality. I think you already have, Doctor. We read every report. We need more. Why not just shoot them? That's what everybody wants. I mean, if you're just gonna cheat. It's not cheating. If you're asking me to betray my.

Rami Malek (12:19)

Oath.

Michael Shannon (12:22)

Why not just shoot them and.

Rhea Seehorn (12:24)

Be done with it?

Michael Shannon (12:28)

After the last great war, we made Germany crawl. We humiliated them, made them pay reparations they couldn't afford. We made them hate us so much that in less than two decades, they went from a broken nation to near world conquerors. We have to do this right, because if we don't, if 15 years from now they come back even stronger.

Terry Gross (12:57)

I.

Michael Shannon (12:57)

Don'T know if we can beat them a third time. If we just shoot these men, we make them martyrs. I'm not going to allow them that. There will be no statues of them. No songs of praise. I'm gonna put Herman Goering on the stand and I'm gonna make him tell the world what he did so that it can never. You brought me here because of Curry? No, I brought you here to show you that before the bullets were fired, before tens of millions of men died, all of this started with laws. This war ends in a courtroom.

Dave Davies (14:00)

And that's our guest, Michael Shannon with Rami Malek in the new film Nuremberg. Give us your sense of your character here, Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice on this historic mission, how you got into his head.

Michael Shannon (14:16)

You know, I was able to do some research that was helpful, a lot of reading. In addition to his work on the Nuremberg trials. I mean, throughout his career, he was a part of so many momentous decisions in the court's history. But I feel like he's pretty plain dealing, straight shooting kind of guy, you know? And what was really fascinating to me was just how extraordinarily difficult it was for him to do something that seemed very logical and necessary. How much opposition he met at every step of the way. How many people said, you know, you shouldn't do this, or this isn't how we should handle this situation or let's just shoot him, which was the prevailing sentiment among a lot of the people in power in America at the time.

Dave Davies (15:12)

Yeah. We just finished a dreadful catastrophic war. Yeah.

Michael Shannon (15:16)

Yeah. And then now here he is talking to this very well meaning at the time. Dr. And still just meeting so much obstruction. And it goes all the way throughout the story. And I think you finally actually in the showdown with Guring, see him really start to lose it a little bit. Just say, why is this so difficult? It's so obvious what's happened. It seems to be so obvious what the outcome should be. Why am I having such a hard time doing this? But I'm so glad that he insisted on it. You know, it was the first time in our civilization's history that there was an international tribunal, I believe, and it was an important precedent that he established. I wish that it was being honored more fervently nowadays.

Dave Davies (16:16)

Right. But there really weren't these international laws before that.

Michael Shannon (16:19)

So he had a lot to do.

Dave Davies (16:20)

They were improvising a lot of it, in a way.

Michael Shannon (16:23)

Yeah. I mean, the charges themselves were, I believe it was the first time that anybody had been charged with crimes against humanity. I don't think that was a term that existed prior to this trial.

Dave Davies (16:40)

Michael Shannon stars as President James Garfield in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, and he plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film Nuremberg. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH.

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Dave Davies (18:06)

We're listening to my interview with actor Michael Shannon. He has a busy acting career, but he's also revived his long standing interest in music. For several years, he and musician friend Jason Nardus to have assembled the band and toured, performing covers of whole albums by several artists, focusing in particular on REM. Here they are performing the REM song Driver 8 on the Tonight Show. Michael Shannon is the lead singer.

Michael Shannon (18:50)

Filled up stone by stone Fields divided one by one and the train Duck yourselves Take a break Driver, driver A, take a break We've been on this ship too long and the drink ductus says take a break driver, driver a Take a break we can't reach our destination but still the ways away but it's still the way is away.

Dave Davies (19:38)

And that is our guest actor Michael Shannon singing Driver 8 with a band including Jason Narducci. That band sounds tight, I got to say. Do you think that music has informed or affected your acting in any way? You know, rhythm, pace, any of that?

Michael Shannon (19:54)

Oh, definitely, yes. They're very interwoven. Particularly when I'm doing theater, I rely on music to inspire me and to give me energy to perform. A lot of times I listen to music on my way to the theater before the show. I mean, I have so many albums on my phone that I'm constantly having to delete things because I'm running out of storage in my memory. But I just, I like to have as much music as close to me as possible at all times.

Dave Davies (20:35)

Yeah, yeah, REM is aware of your doing this and I think some of the band members showed up at a performance once and went on stage with you. Right?

Michael Shannon (20:43)

I mean, they've all. Yeah, when we, when we play in Athens, Georgia, we've done two tours so far and when we go to Athens, they, they all make a point of coming to that show, which is really sweet and special and mind blowing. And there have been other shows where one of them might make an appearance, depending on where we are in the country. But yeah, they, they, they, they're definitely interested in it and they've been unbelievably gracious about the whole thing.

Dave Davies (21:19)

So what's next for you?

Michael Shannon (21:21)

Oh, goodness. Well, we are going to do yet another REM tour. These tours have been commemorating the 40th anniversary of particular albums. So the first one was for Murmur, REM's first full length album, and the second one we did was the 40th anniversary of Fables of the Reconstruction. So now we are going to go back out on the road with the 40th anniversary of an album called Life's Rich Pageant. And that tour is in February and March. In terms of my actual day job, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing next. I did shoot a film earlier this year called Mr. Irrelevant, which is a football movie in which I play the coach, Bill Parcells.

Dave Davies (22:15)

Right.

Michael Shannon (22:16)

And that will be coming out, I assume sometime next year. But other than that, I don't have anything in the can, the proverbial can. So it'll be. It's as much a mystery to me as anybody else right now.

Dave Davies (22:32)

Michael Shannon, thank you so much for speaking with us again.

Michael Shannon (22:35)

Thanks for having me, Dave.

Dave Davies (22:37)

Michael Shannon is a two time Academy Award nominee. He stars as President James Garfield in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning and he plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film Nuremberg. Terry has our next interview here she is.

Terry Gross (22:55)

One of the most talked about TV series now is the Apple TV series Pluribus. Created by Vince Gilligan. It stars my guest Ray Seahorse. You may know her as the co star of Better Call Saul which was both a prequel and sequel to Breaking Bad. Seehorn and Pluribus were just each nominated for a Golden Globe. In Pluribus, Seehorn plays Carol, a writer of best selling romance novels. Her life partner Helen is her manager. One night, Carol and Helen are leaving a bar when Helen has a seizure and Diesel. Suddenly everyone around Carol in the bar and in the ER are frozen in place or have fallen down in having a seizure. And then most of them get up and seem changed. They're talking and walking in unison. Their faces are somewhere between happy and hypnotized. What's going on back home when Carol turns on the TV looking for a new show that might explain. All the channels are blank except C Span. A man on that channel is at a White House podium talking directly to Carol by name. He gives her a phone number to call for more information. She calls and the man she saw on the TV is the one talking to her. He apologizes for Helen's death. Millions of others have died, including the President. He explains that everyone now has the benefits of an extraterrestrial technology. Through pulsing signals that were sent, everyone around the world is now held together by a psychic glue. Here's part of that scene.

Dave Davies (24:31)

Rest assured, Carol, we will figure out what makes you different.

Rhea Seehorn (24:36)

Figure it out? Why?

Dave Davies (24:38)

So we can fix it.

Michael Shannon (24:40)

So you can join us. Carol, you still there?

Rhea Seehorn (24:55)

You said my life was my own.

Dave Davies (24:57)

It is. 100%.

Rhea Seehorn (25:02)

So what happens when I say no?

Dave Davies (25:05)

Carol, Once you understand how wonderful this is. Carol?

Terry Gross (25:16)

As time goes by Carol learns that everyone has access to everyone else's memories and knowledge. Everyone is happy and there's peace around the world. Except for Carol and a few others. She isn't buying that these transformations are a good thing, and she does everything she can to resist. Rhea Seehorn, welcome to FRESH air. I love this series. I loved you'd on Better Call Saul. It's really such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Rhea Seehorn (25:42)

Oh, my gosh, thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here.

Terry Gross (25:45)

Thank you. The premise of this series is sci fi, but the show itself is asking so many questions about human nature. Like what is happiness? Is it happiness if there's no longer a larger meaning to your life? And is being an individual with your own temperament and thoughts, is that more valuable than this happiness? And is anger lethal or is it good to let out your anger and resist what you think is wrong? You know, maybe we'll find out some answers to those questions and many other questions later. But I just want people to know it's there's some really interesting thoughts in this.

Rhea Seehorn (26:32)

Thank you.

Terry Gross (26:33)

And did you find yourself asking what is happiness as you made the series?

Rhea Seehorn (26:40)

Yeah, I definitely was asking myself a lot of those questions throughout this series. And we had amazing conversations among the crew and the cast. You know, some of these late night shoots and even on weekends stuff of like, well, would you choose what's best for the individual versus what's best for the community as a whole? I personally think I would absolutely be Team Carol as far as arguing, you know, the necessity and the positives of individual thinking and independent thinking. For one thing. A big thing that came up for me was the fact that this group think no matter how intelligent and how peaceful. One of the ideas of happiness and joy, which maybe is slightly different, is being surprised by things, whether it's wonder growing up as a kid and hopefully still as an adult or a giant belly laugh. And if you cannot be surprised, there's never going to be any new art. There's never going to be a joke that you haven't heard. There's never going to be surprise behavior that makes you laugh. And that's just such a source of joy for me that I just can't imagine that contentment is the same as happiness.

Terry Gross (28:04)

One of the other characteristics of your character in Pluribus is that she is angry. A lot of the time. She already had a kind of anger issue, but now that she's one of like 12 or 13 people in the whole world who haven't been affected by this. Whatever it is, this alien technology, she's angry all the time. You know, her wife died as this thing started as a result of this thing, and she has no one she can really confide in because everybody is transformed, and she knows that. She believes there's something really terrible behind this. So she's angry all the time. Your character on Better Call Saul had her own anger issues, and you're really good at expressing anger.

Rhea Seehorn (28:57)

Kim Wexler was an incredibly capable person at suppressing it, whereas I do not think Carol is. But, yeah, I guess she did have anger, a certain righteousness about her.

Terry Gross (29:12)

So, you know, we talked about how the series has affected you, thinking about happiness. What about anger? Because anger can be really destructive. And in this series, in Pluribus, when she gets angry, people die. Like, anger is literally poison, a killing poison. But in real life, sometimes it's important to get angry, because first of all, you just need to express yourself. But second of all, somebody needs to know that you really offended or hurt or think that something is morally or ethically wrong. And sometimes it takes anger to really get the point across. Did you find yourself thinking about anger a lot and your levels of anger? I have no idea if you like to express anger.

Rhea Seehorn (30:03)

No. I struggle mightily with how much I suppress my anger. And as you said, there's this idea of anger can be a miasma almost, that can spread. And we've all seen horrible things can happen when you just are riling people up, frothing at the mouth with anger about things and negativity. But at the same time, it is a necessary emotion, which I think is one of the arguments in the show that I side with, of the idea that all of the emotions are important, not just happiness. But I had asked Vincent. He wasn't coming at it from an angle of particularly a woman being angry, but because I'm a woman playing the role that I paused a lot thinking about that, because I do think that I have grown up in a world that maybe it's on me. But it felt as though I was taught that anger was unpalatable, specifically from females, and that I should find a way to make it palatable, make my requests palatable, and not express a lot of anger. When I was much younger, I would scream it as a teenager. Screaming, yelling, like the typical arguments you have over hairspray and idiotic things at home as a teenager. But plus, it was. My parents were divorced, and so it was a household of three women, my mom and my sister and I. So there were actually a lot of hairspray arguments. But, you know, you kind of grow out of this complete temperamental. Just, I'm going to spew anything I want coming out of my mouth and you get out into the real world. And it did feel like and it's interesting you ask because I haven't pinned down, like, was it something I saw in real life or something on a television show or where was I getting this messaging that it wasn't okay to raise my voice, to be very, very sharp? I'm not sure of the answer of that, but I know that it got to a place where it went too far, literally, to the place of like, I'm nodding and just saying yes or whatever to somebody that's maybe speaking to me in a way that I absolutely disagree with. And I go home and break out in eczema. And that's not an exaggeration.

Terry Gross (32:43)

Oh, gosh. Yeah. Yeah.

Rhea Seehorn (32:45)

So I'm just like, clearly the anger is going somewhere. I don't think it's okay to scream and yell in someone's face, but I think I have become conflict avoidant in the suppression of that anger to a degree that's not healthy. I will stand up for somebody else, though, in a heartbeat. If somebody else is being mistreated next to me, I'm in there. I'll take you to the mat. But if it's at me, I tend to swallow it and try to figure out how I can make it better.

Dave Davies (33:13)

We're listening to Terry's interview with Rhea Seehorn, who stars in the new Apple TV series Pluribus. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break, and Maureen Corgan will share her list of the year's best books. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH AIR weekend.

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Dave Davies (35:04)

Let's get back to Terry's interview with Rhea Seehorn. She stars in the new Apple TV series Pluribus. Both Seehorn and the show have been nominated for Golden Globe Awards.

Terry Gross (35:16)

I want to point out something else that I think is very relevant to today in the series. The series is called Pluribus, which translates to out of many, one. And in this era where diversity, equity and inclusion is basically being outlawed to the extent that they can by the Trump administration, E Pluribus unum has always been one of the founding principles or slogans, if you want to call it that, of the United States. So this kind of conformity is really the opposite of DEI because there's no diversity and equity, there's no diversity, so there's no need for equity and inclusion because everybody has the same thoughts.

Rhea Seehorn (36:08)

Or you could argue that it's the ultimate in all inclusion and everybody has equal everything.

Terry Gross (36:14)

That's true. That's true. But that's by erasing their religion, their ethnicity, their geography.

Rhea Seehorn (36:22)

Or you could say they are all religions and they are all geographies.

Terry Gross (36:26)

Right. And you could also say they're all artificial intelligence because that's also how they sound when they're speaking. They're not. But when they speak, it sometimes sounds like, you know, the verbal artificial intelligence talking to you.

Rhea Seehorn (36:41)

I also really appreciated that our new pope that his favorite motto apparently is E Pluribus Unum. So I really appreciate him advertising the show.

Terry Gross (36:50)

Oh yeah, I thought you were gonna tell me he was a fan and I thought, really, he has time.

Rhea Seehorn (36:54)

No, no, he just says that that came out that that was one of his favorite mottos, I guess. And I was like, we were just laughing. Thanks. Thanks for the shout out.

Terry Gross (37:06)

So your character starts off as a famous romance novelist with this ardent following. And she goes to a bookstore and does a reading there, which everybody loves, and it's a romance novel aboard A ship with a pirate. Anyways, the language is full of really typical romance book language. So did you do research and go to readings of romance novelists?

Rhea Seehorn (37:40)

I did. I went to the Ripped Bodice, which is an amazing romance novel store that only does romance novels in Culver City, and just slipped in and looked around. I have to tell you, one of the first things that struck me is the amount of subgenres and the specificity of these subgenres. It's historical, paranormal, it could be romance suspense. Then within that, there were sub. Subgenres of ones that people that want them to be more dialogue, more chatty versus more descriptive. More descriptive. Descriptive, yeah. And certainly, you know, those LGBT QIA stuff, there's stuff that people really want to sound, period. There's stuff that people want to sound futuristic versus very contemporary slang language. It was kind of incredible. But I also watched a couple people do readings from their books, and I was really surprised at the breadth of people, of fans listening. There was a lot of people dressed like early Stevie Nicks in a beautiful way. But then there was also, like, you know, just a. There was some couple that looked like they came straight from a corporate job. A man and a woman in office suits. Young people. People younger than me. People older than me. It definitely. It definitely wizened me to how huge this genre is and how much it encapsulates, you know, all the different novels it has.

Terry Gross (39:26)

So the character in Pluribus was originally written for a man by Vince Gilligan, and then he decided to rewrite it for you. How did that happen?

Rhea Seehorn (39:39)

I don't believe there were scripts, you know, with the male character. And then he went back and rewrote, I think. I think he said he was.

Terry Gross (39:50)

Conceiving.

Rhea Seehorn (39:50)

At 4, kind of kicking around. Yeah, conceiving quite a few concepts he was interested in. I think he said that. And it was during Better Call Saul in season one, I think he said, taking breaks from the writer's room and walking around on lunch breaks and stuff and just started. It's just how he works. He just. Ideas will pop in his head sometimes. Questions without answers. And one of them was, what would happen if you woke up? And the whole world was obsequious. The whole world was willing to do whatever you wanted to and give you anything you want. And it was a male character. And he has said that it's just because that's second nature to him, that he is a man and he has written male protagonist. And then I don't know the exact, like, shift that happened or Where. But I didn't know about it until after we had wrapped all of Better Call Saul. But he said it was during, I think, towards the end of season one of Better Call Saul. He was just watching me work and had talked to me a lot about the way I work, as well as watching me perform, and decided that I'm stuttering because it's hard to say this because I'm floored by the compliment and the flattery, to put it mildly, and struggle saying it about myself. But he said that he. He realized, like, I have to write something for her. I need to make sure that I do a project with her. And actually, wouldn't these concepts that I'm noodling with, wouldn't they work even better if they were her? And he knew that. He also wanted to play with tone and take wild swings as far as, like, it could be darkly comedic or it could be darkly psychological. Sometimes it's gonna, you know, go between back and forth. And he was impressed at my ability to do those things. So hard for me to say about myself. That can be the title of this episode. Rhea Seehorn brags about herself. Yeah, I don't know. Listen, I've had to sit next to him in interviews when he's saying it, and I'm just. My face is one giant tomato red ball when he's saying it. But I'm certainly very thankful for it.

Terry Gross (42:11)

You thought you would have a career in the visual arts as a painter. How did you get into acting? What changed your mind?

Rhea Seehorn (42:20)

I wanted so badly to run away with the circus. And by that I mean television and film. I was obsessed with television, film. And as a kid in the suburbs in Virginia, I'd never known anybody that had even the loosest association with the entertainment business and thought it was just an impossible dream. And then in my first year at George Mason University, you had to take an elective in the arts. That was not your major. And my major was fine arts. And so I took an acting class with Lenny Raybuck. And very thankfully, it was not a emotional ooey gooey class. I took plenty of those later. But this was a hardcore do your homework script analysis class using practical aesthetics that was developed out of the Atlantic Theater. And I just was in love with the fact that if you work really hard and study, you can incrementally get closer and closer to being good at this and hopefully one day, great at this. And that was the best news ever to me because I didn't know a lot about how to do this thing. But I thought, oh, if you just want hours put in and like stay home and study and work at this, I'm in. And then almost immediately the idea that, oh, this is studying the behavior of humans and the whys. And it was at times a very difficult household coming up. And the idea that you could actually start thinking about people's behavior as.

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Rhea Seehorn (43:58)

Result of what it is that they want and their inability to use the correct tactic or the given circumstance that are holding them back, it's just like it blew my mind that that is how you can organize human behavior and not only have empathy for it, but mimic it in a way that invites people in to go on a journey with you when you're on stage. And then I started going to D.C. theater, which I think is some of the world's best theater is Washington D.C. the and watching those performers and was just like, I have to do this immediately. I have to do this for the rest of my life. I don't know how many day jobs I'm gonna have to have. It was not about being famous. I knew that I had to be an actor and I'd support myself however I had to.

Terry Gross (44:47)

Well, Racy Horn, I wanna thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this interview. I really like Pluribus.

Rhea Seehorn (44:53)

Thanks.

Terry Gross (44:55)

So thank you for all of that.

Rhea Seehorn (44:57)

This is a dream come true being here.

Dave Davies (44:59)

Rhea Seehorn stars in the new Apple TV series Pluribus. Need a book for holiday gift giving? Maureen Corrigan can Recommend at least 10. Here's her annual best books list.

Rami Malek (45:12)

My picks for this year's best books tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Karen Russell's long awaited second novel, the Antidote is my pick for novel of the year. An epic story of immigration, land grabs and aspiration, The Antidote is set in Nebraska and framed by two actual weather catastrophes. The Black Sunday dust storm on April 14, 1935, in which people were suffocated by a moving black wall of dust. And a month later, the Republican River Flood. The central character here is a so called prairie witch who heals her customers by holding whatever they can't stand to know. Russell herself is America's own prairie witch of a writer, exhuming memories out of our national unconscious and inviting us through her spellbinding writing to see our history in full. Patrick Ryan's Buckeye is a more straightforward historical novel, set, as its title indicates, in Ohio, stretching from Pre World War II to the close of the 20th century. The story focuses on two married couples. When we first meet her, Margaret Salt, a red headed looker, walks into the hardware store where Cal Jenkins works and demands that he turn on the radio. There's commotion in the streets and because Margaret's husband is in the Navy, she wants to know what's happening. It turns out Germany has surrendered. Overwhelmed, Margaret kisses Cal and married man Cal likes it. Throughout the novel, Ryan's narrator underscores how chance moments shape our lives. Like Karen Russell, Kiran Desai has kept readers waiting for her second novel, but the loneliness of Sonia and Sunny makes the wait worthwhile. At the outset, Sonia, a college student in Vermont, is homesick for her native India. Her depression makes her vulnerable to a visiting painter, an art monster. Meanwhile, Sunny has left India to work in New York, but distance can't shield him from his fearsome mother. Desai's near 700 page novel ruminates on exile and displacement and tells a tangled love story with enough coincidences to make Dickens blush. My last fiction pick is more in the Jane Austen miniaturist mode. Hart the Lover is a companion novel to Lilly King's 2020 novel Writers and Lovers, but the structure of this follow up is so ingenious that you don't have to have read the earlier book. This is an emotionally charged story about a young woman with literary ambitions screwing up, wising up, finding herself and realizing what she may have lost in the process. On to nonfiction. Gertrude Stein's writing pudding, as the critic Wyndham Lewis put it, sometimes has the consistency of a cold black suet pudding, the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through. And yet, maddening as she can be, many of us sense that when it comes to Stein's literary genius, there really was a there there. Francesca Wade's lively, unconventional biography called Gertrude An Afterlife doesn't end at Stein's death in 1946, but also tells the story of the obsessive admirers who helped Stein achieve serious posthumous recognition. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is one of the most vivid and exquisitely written memoirs of a mother daughter relationship I've ever read. Roy's single mother was a beloved teacher who founded a school in India. Roy and her brother, however, endured their erratic mother's rage. And yet, Roy writes of her mother, I truly believed she would outlive me. When she didn't, I was wrecked, heart smashed. Like Gertrude Stein and Roy's mother, Patti Smith defies easy characterization. Her latest memoir, Bread of Angels, expands upon Just Kids, her 2010 memoir that's since become a classic, Smith delves into more intimate material here, like the secret of her paternity, her sense of her own sexuality and her 14 year marriage to the late musician Fred Sonic Smith. If Patti Smith's title references Angels, Stephen Greenblatt's Dark Renaissance invokes the somewhat devilish figure of playwright Christopher Marlowe. I can think of nobody who brings the world of the English Renaissance to life with the verb and erudition of Greenblatt. Here he explores the mysteries of Marlowe's originality and his murder at age 29. In 2017, historian Judith Geisberg and her team of grad student researchers launched a website called Last Seen Finding Family After Slavery. It now contains over 4,500 ads placed in newspapers by once enslaved people hoping to find loved ones. Geisberg's arresting book, also called Last seen, closely reads 10 of those ads, giving readers a deeper sense of the lived experience of slavery and its aftermath. My final best book pick is A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst, which is part extreme adventure tale, part meditation on marriage. In 1972, Morris and Marilyn Bailey spent four months adrift in the middle of the Pacific after a whale knocked a hole in their wooden sloop. They held themselves together mentally by focusing on small things like the card games that Marilyn devised. Not bad advice, perhaps, for all of us in challenging times ahead. Happy holidays, everyone.

Dave Davies (52:11)

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Briggs. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tonya Moseley, I'm Dave Davies.

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