Chuck is overlooking us at the end of the room. We’re in the boardroom, which is his power seat. Now he’s losing control.Ībsolutely, it’s the worst thing. What is it about that specific humiliation that really gets to Howard? It feels like he always needs to have some measure of control over the setting, and he’s very particular about everything. But even before that big moment, this is already Howard’s biggest episode of the show. Well, I’m sure there will be some fan fiction of that. That didn’t happen, and that’s why I’m not a writer.
I thought Gus Fring and I would be at a rotary club or something in the community, and I always sort of thought they would both compliment each other’s suits. I always thought I was going to have a scene with Jonathan Banks, or, actually, Giancarlo Esposito.
I love the fact that Tom gave Howard the line to Lalo, “You want my advice? Find better lawyers!” To the end, he’s being the affable Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, even in this moment - until he sees the gravity of what’s going on, and it still can’t compute. It works because it’s unexpected to me and to Jimmy that he’s there. I remember getting chills, like, “Oh, Mike and Kim are talking now? That’s something.” But my interaction with Tony is very slight. I remember watching episode four, where Mike and Kim finally see one another and have a conversation. What’s it like crossing over into that space? Like you alluded to, I often think of the show as having two halves, the lawyer half and the violent-crime drama half. I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the show, except for those last few seconds.
I participated in a lawyer show that has some emotional problems. Six years of Better Call Saul, and I never shared a scene with a bad guy, unless you want to say Saul Goodman is. Had you ever even shared a scene with Tony Dalton? That’s like a shot in the dark as I’m driving away. It sort of took my breath away on the page. And it’s only two thirds of the page, but it says, “Lalo enters.” I was like, What? And then literally half a page later, it’s over. But when reading it, I’m reading it, I’m like, “Oh, these are great scenes,” and then I get to that last page. So I didn’t know what was going on until 607 was dropped, and I had two weeks before we started shooting it. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know specifics, and like all the seasons, it’s come to me script by script by script. I knew I was going to bow out early, that was already told to me before the season. Did you have that same shock moment when you first heard about the ending? I’m curious what your perspective is of that. They wanted the shock value of those last 30 seconds. That pleases me, because that means the creators’ vision was accomplished. I figured this was going to be a big episode for Howard, but I wasn’t expecting to be doing a post-mortem interview here! If it doesn’t work, it’s going to be Howard’s fault, not Tom Schnauz’s fault. But I can almost guarantee you people are going to start sending out memes doing it, saying either it works or it doesn’t work. I have to ask first about the most important part of the episode: the rotating-can trick Howard learned from Chuck for stopping a shaken soda from fizzing. Fabian talked to Vulture about unexpectedly crossing into the series’ violent half and recontextualizing Howard’s journey knowing how it all ends. It was a darkly funny but devastating turn for the character - and his arc came to an even more disturbing end when the terrifying Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) shot him in the head in the episode’s final scene. In the mid-season finale of Better Call Saul’s final season, “Plan and Execution,” Jimmy and Kim finally pulled off their convoluted scheme to discredit Howard, partly to force a settlement in the Sandpiper Crossing class-action suit and partly out of a petty desire to take him down a peg (or 10). But Howard’s acts of generosity are often willfully misinterpreted by characters like Jimmy and Kim who, a few legitimate grievances aside, seem to hate Howard mainly because he’s an easy target. For all the ways he took Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) for granted in the first two seasons, he has shown a capacity for surprising acts of empathy, especially in the wake of his law partner, Chuck McGill’s, death in season four he even offered Jimmy a job at his own company, Hamlin Hamlin McGill (HHM), to make amends in season five. The man who, according to Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), “reached a level of douchebaggery that will live on for generations” has always shown signs that he’s more complicated than that. Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) has long been one of Better Call Saul’s most underrated characters. Spoilers ahead for the mid-season finale of Better Call Saul.