Jennifer L. Bryan has collaborated with Vince Gilligan and his merry band of recurring cast and crew for years now. According to her, she wouldn’t have it any other way, missing the shorthand she has with them when she works on other projects between seasons. Apple TV just announced that Pluribus is their number one new show, and Screen Speck sat down with Bryan to discuss everything costume-related on the streamer’s sci-fi hit, from what it’s like to dress the hive mind, working with Rhea Seehorn to build a new character, and how Bryan’s costume choices actually influenced the show’s marketing.
Screen Speck: You’ve worked on several of Vince Gilligan’s shows now. What do you like about working with him, and how has your creative collaboration evolved over the years?
Jennifer Bryan: You know, it’s highly unusual in our industry to have almost an unbroken continuum with a production family. And, what’s been great about it is that there is absolutely a sense of ultimate teamwork, a working family with lineage. There are people on the crew that go back to the origins, the first season and beyond of Breaking Bad. And it’s very interesting to note the shorthand that we have. And when I go on to other projects in between, I miss that shorthand. His approach over the years gets imprinted on you, which influences how you approach a task. To kind of know, okay, I think this would appeal to him, or maybe not, or let me throw this and see. You know, it’s like you’re playing baseball, and you know where the outfielders are.
Screen Speck: So, for this particular show, Pluribus, did he give you any specific notes about what he wanted for the look of the show?
Bryan: Yes, he did. We had a meeting, prior to going to Albuquerque, I started my prep in LA, and at that stage, the prep is mostly research into articles and literature and references and so on. And what he said in my first meeting with him for Pluribus was that he wanted, from my costume environment, he wanted something that was never seen on TV before. He was like “I don’t want zombies.” They have to exude something special, or unique about them, but it had to be quite subtle, not giving away too much too soon. He gave me a couple films to watch. I remember a Kurosawa [film], I Am Legend with Will Smith. Then also, on my own, I did Walking Dead and all of those zombie classics that we know, although this is far from a zombie movie. It’s just at a much more ethereal level.
Screen Speck: Speaking of that, I wanted to ask you about your approach to dressing the hive mind. The DHL guy (Robert Bailey Jr.), he still wears his uniform. Zosia (Karolina Wydra) seems to dress up, around Diabaté (Samba Schutte), but around Carol, she seems to dress a little bit more casual. Do they dress like their person would have prior to the virus taking over? What was the thought process behind how to costume those individuals?
Bryan: Yeah, that was a challenge because I knew going in that I was probably gonna have hundreds [of the Joining] in different scenes. What I presented to Vince was that they were a collective. I approached them as a character, because that is a character that Carol Sturka is playing against. So, I made two pitches to him. Number one, the general approach to clothing for them is that in the hive mind, clothing no longer represents status, wealth, religious affinity, geographical placement, how you feel that morning waking up, whether you decided to wear this versus that. It does not factor into your daily decision of how you want the world to see you. So with that groundwork, and also the fact that, story-wise, the Joining happened in their walks of life. So, you will see a cyclist, you’ll see a truck driver, you’ll see those uniforms that you recognize that tells you what trade that person is, or what profession that person is, or maybe that person looks pretty well off, or that person is not so well off, because it kind of zaps them globally in their normal moment. So that’s kind of like the starting point.
But the other message that clothing needs to send is that it is not a separator of humans, because in our modern day, it is. You decided whether consciously or unconsciously, to wear that sweater today. I decided, consciously, to wear this shirt today. So those things go out of clothing selection for them. You’re gonna see it more in Season 2, there are little bits of it in Season 1, that it is not necessary for them to coordinate to make sure the sweatshirt works with the jeans, or that the garment even actually fit them, because at this point, clothing has been whittled down to its initial use, and that is to protect the body. So, you will see kind of a mismatch look.
Also, in creating the looks for them overall, I did have another template that I presented to him, and he really gobbed onto this, was that the clothing should just solely be for protection, which means you don’t need adornment. You don’t need earrings. You don’t need a necklace, you don’t need a ring, you don’t need a watch. You don’t need a watch, because they know what time it is, literally. So, everything is the basics. Vince didn’t want me to have hats on them on either, because he said hats and belts, serve no purpose. I relinquished the hat, but I had to pitch to him that a guy needs a belt, or else the pants are gonna fall off. Especially if they don’t care, or have any thought that the pants need to fit nicely. So he acquiesced on the belts for guys, only for guys, because that’s functional for men. And then, in all of that, I tried to layer interest among these people in their clothes, because again, they got this [virus] while they were in the office, while they were in the mail room, while they were on the DHL truck, or while they were at TGIF Fridays, or while they were in that country western bar. So it is a frozen-in-time moment. Then, of course, as the days go on, they change their clothes. But they change their clothes into what already exists on the earth, just like with food. So there’s no shopping. They’ll just put on a top and a bottom, and a pair of shoes, because your feet need to be protected.
Screen Speck: Thinking about that loss of individuality, this helps me pivot to my next question. I wanted to ask, about Carol’s yellow jacket that she wears in the pilot, because it’s such a visually stunning and chic look. I was curious how that jacket was decided on for what is really the big action set piece of the pilot, when that virus is rapidly spreading. I know a lot of yellow was used in the show’s marketing, so I was curious if that came from the jacket or vice versa.
Bryan: It came from the jacket! You nailed it on the head. It came from the jacket, and in the beginning, I, you know, just me, Jennifer, I was seeing the ads and starting to see the promos, I was like, oh, that’s cool. And I was actually thinking that it was Vince’s theme color from the coverall suits in Breaking Bad. I found out that that was not the case. The merchandising and publicity and PR arm of Apple TV, they were so impressed and so enthralled and so curious about how this yellow popped on [screen]. So from the yellow of the leather jacket, they chose that as a color theme for advertising. And I have to say, I think that’s a first for me. It’s huge, but I can’t recall any other costume designs in television or film that pulled their thematic color of the show — driving ad, press, PR, etc. — from the color of a costume.
Screen Speck: That’s amazing.
Bryan: I know, I know!
Screen Speck: I was so curious about that, because as soon as you see that yellow jacket, it just… it really pops, it really pops in those scenes.
Bryan: And so the color, you may say, well, where did the color come from The color came out of my head. I did not reference Breaking Bad to it at all. I read the first draft and realized how much action she had to do, that the material demanded something very sturdy — pulling Helen’s body off the truck, running, fighting off people. I realized for her and for her stunt actress, it had to be rugged, so [my] first thought was leather. I knew also that the opening scene, from the moment of being in a country western bar, was going to be nighttime scenes. We know she’s gonna run, she’s gonna tumble, she’s gonna push this half-dead guy across the passenger seat of his Ford truck. I mean, there was so much physical work in there for Rhea to do for Carol’s character. I was like, It definitely has to be leather, it’s at night, it can’t be black, because then that’s just, like, what am I doing, the Fonz? It’s just too basic. And I went yellow. Yellow is one of those colors that almost glows at night. It’s also a precautionary color, the yellow of traffic lights, which that family of yellow is in.
Screen Speck: You worked with Rhea before on Better Call Saul to build quite a specific look for Kim Wexler. I’m curious about the approach you and Rhea took with this character, especially because after Helen passes, her looks are quite less put-together, for obvious reasons. There are a lot of shades of blue in there. How did you all decide to convey Carol’s grief through wardrobe?
Bryan: So that brings me back to the first question when we were talking about working in continuum, not only [with] a production team, but also an actress. So Rhea and I have, gosh, six seasons of Better Call Saul. So beyond incredible collaboration with her and obviously a friendship and a shorthand that comes along with that, what a gift it was to have an actress that I had set a palette with, and a very specific look for 6 years. When we started Better Call Saul, her and I had deep conversations of how we wanted her to look. And we landed on the same train of thought. And, when Pluribus came about, we started that process, and what we had to do — Rhea had to do it, I had to do it — we had to dump Kim Wexler. We gotta reinvent. New character, same body.
Screen Speck: No more suits and ponytails.
Bryan: No, right. So, the tightly wound ponytail, Trish Almeida, our hairstylist, who created that amazing ponytail that told us all things.
Screen Speck: Everything you need to know about that character is in that ponytail.
Bryan: Yes, so as you can imagine, the new hairstyle for Rhea, playing Carol Sturka, a lot of discussions went into it, and a lot of looks. Do they keep it the same color? Is it long? Is it short? We knew that whatever it was gonna be, it wasn’t gonna be a ponytail. Whatever I was gonna do, you are never gonna see her in a buttoned-up, legal, you know, corner suite kind of look. She was going to be a bit disorganized. Helen really kept her on a track of realism and appreciating her fortune. Even though she was very dismissive of how she got her wealth and fortune and accolades as a writer. That writer suit at the Barnes & Noble, that was interesting, because Vince and I also had a lot of conversations about how that would look. He gave me some clues, like, think of these popular female novelists that have been very successful, like, you know, Jackie Collins. And then there’s another one, Barbara Cartland, a couple of those matured, well-respected in their market, romance novelists, the pulp romance fictions. I started looking at those ladies, and that was my template for Carol Sturka, author of Wycaro. Then after that, she sheds that skin. And the minute we lose Helen, sadly, she doesn’t have a real base of reference, and Rhea and I talked about this, that she’s in such chaos, she’s in such disbelief as to what’s happened, similarly to the Joining, her clothes have some haphazardness. She slept in the yellow jacket when she got drunk that night. She got up the next morning, she takes off the jacket, but she’s so out of it, I don’t know if you noticed, she put the gray sweater on over the blue sweater she had on the night before to go dig the grave. She is not together and things are collapsing around her. So her sense of clothing and style also disintegrates a little bit. So Rhea and I had those kinds of conversations. We had many fittings, many, many looks that I had to come up with.
This interview was edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
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