After ‘Pluribus’, Revisit Rhea Seehorn’s Next Best Genre Role: ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Tutorial Sorceress
Carol Sturka's career as a romantasy author suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Pluribus season one has ended. As the wait for season two of the Apple TV series begins, newly minted fans of lead actor Rhea Seehorn are discovering something fans of her work on Better Call Saul delighted in years ago: her early-career role as a Magic: The Gathering video game tutorial sorceress.
This piece of nerdy trivia—which dovetails pleasingly with Seehorn’s character on Pluribus, Carol Sturka, being a romantasy author—resurfaced on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! podcast. Seehorn, a guest panelist on the show, was asked about her first credit listed on IMDB. Long before Better Call Saul or Pluribus, back in 1997, she played “the tutorial sorceress” in the Magic: The Gathering video game.
“That was a very early job, yes,” Seehorn said in response. “In the original game it was, like, software of the card game. But it came with a tutorial … about how to navigate through the game. And me and an actor named Reggie, we were playing sorcerer and sorceress.”
She continued. “It was so low-budget that they didn’t have shoes, but they wanted us to look like we were wearing gladiator sorcerer boots or whatever. So we’re just wearing tube socks with electrical tape in a criss-cross fashion.”
Asked if she’d ever actually played the game, Seehorn explained, “I was so excited that my photo was on the back that I went to Best Buy. I couldn’t afford whatever the game was back then—it was like $45 or something. I showed them the picture on the back, and I was like, ‘This is me, oh my god! I did that! Would you give me a copy?'”
Alas, Best Buy didn’t cough up a freebie back then—but Seehorn’s legacy lives on forever as part of Magic. The NPR interviewer even wondered how many “aging nerds” saw her on Pluribus and thought she looked oddly familiar somehow.
Listen to the whole Rhea Seehorn interview in the video below; the Magic chat starts around 26 minutes in.
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