Kimberly Wexler is a fictional character in the television series Better Call Saul, a spin-off of Breaking Bad. Kim is primarily portrayed by Rhea Seehorn, and was created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. An intelligent and proficient lawyer, she is the confidant and love interest of Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman, whom she later marries. Kim's characterization and Seehorn's performance have received critical acclaim, earning her two Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series nominations.
Conception and development
In writing the pilot for Better Call Saul, showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould included the character of Kim but due to her being a new character to the Breaking Bad universe, especially in relation to Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman or Mike Ehrmantraut, they had not yet developed a plan for her story. Gilligan said the writers had written Kim as "perhaps a love interest past tense, or potential love interest future tense", and possibly waning out of Jimmy's life later. She was originally a "tempering influence" for Jimmy, but otherwise the writers had few ideas as to where else they would take her character. Rhea Seehorn auditioned and got the role in April 2014, about two months before the pilot was shot. According to casting director Sharon Bialy, they had used two fake scenes to keep the high-profile project a secret, and when Seehorn auditioned and impressed them with both scenes, only then did they go to the next step and explain the audition's true purpose. Seehorn was able to adapt to this change to the role of Kim in a single take.
The pilot had two scenes with Kim, one which involves her counseling Jimmy after Howard Hamlin chews him out. The scene as written had minimal direction, but Seehorn, in preparing for the shot, saw a number of subtleties with the scene that suggested she knew Jimmy intimately, that she had boundaries, and she was used to cleaning up after Jimmy's mistakes. She also felt from this scene that Kim would prefer to listen before speaking and using that as a position of power. The writers saw how Seehorn acted out the scene and realized how much more it defined the character going forward, someone that prioritized work and placed boundaries on her relationship with Jimmy but still cared for him. Gilligan considered Seehorn's ongoing performance as Kim essential to her development. Seehorn had already gotten an idea that Kim enjoyed participating on Jimmy's cons, a fact established in the screenplay for the fourth episode of the first season "Hero", but which Seehorn had yet to see. Seehorn was able to use very subtle smiles to indicate Kim's appreciation for Jimmy during that episode, which Gould said, "The way she played it just felt so right that it gave us a strong feeling for where we were going with her." Gould later said of Wexler's acting, "Kim Wexler has the greatest poker face of any character I've ever seen. She's somebody who knows when to stay silent instead of speaking her mind, but while this character can conceal her thoughts from the other characters in the scene, we in the audience can see everything that's going on in her. It's a magic trick that is remarkable. It has a lot to do with Rhea's intelligence. She has such a sharp, perceptive way of looking at the world, and she brings that to Kim."
With this change, the writers saw Kim no longer being as moral as planned and gave her a darker side that arose from her childhood, something that gave her a chip on her shoulder that would make her give in to more unethical approaches if it got the job done, and thus one that readily fell into work alongside Jimmy in his cons after fighting her reluctant nature to join in. Gould called this "The emotional connection between these two characters had a gravitational pull that started twisting the whole story around." This also drastically altered the direction they took Jimmy's transformation into Saul. The first-season finale, "Marco" shows Jimmy walking away from a potential job with the law firm Davis & Main that Kim had set up for him. Season two was to continue with Jimmy outright forgoing the job, but because the writers wanted to include Kim more based on Seehorn's performance, they altered this to show Jimmy returning and accepting the job for Kim's sake.