Better Call Saul stars pick their all-time favorite scenes

Kim's surprise proposal of marriage. Her surprise proposal to take down Howard a peg. Jimmy and Mike's desert survival trek. Jimmy and Chuck's clash in front of a hearing board. Nacho's decision to switch Hector's pills and Gus' decision to then save Hector's life. Mike's guilt-soaked confession about his son's death. Nacho's death. Howard's death. And don't forget Lalo's death. Over the course of six subversive seasons, Better Call Saul offered up plenty of haunting, harrowing, and transcendent moments that made a second trip to the ABQ a first-rate experience.

As part of EW's farewell-to-Saul coverage, Rhea Seehorn, Bob Odenkirk, and their costars on AMC's Breaking Bad prequel revealed the most challenging scenes they had to film over here, and below, they share their favorite scenes. It wasn't easy for them to select just one moment, as personal preferences can shift on a whim, maybe even more often than Hector rings his bell. But the cast gamely rummaged through 63 episodes of memories and saluted a stellar standout scene. Confrontations, coded conversations, showdowns, breakdowns — it's all here. (And for much more, check out our Better Call Saul digital cover story.)

RHEA SEEHORN (Kim)

While reminding you that her personal pick "changes day to day," Seehorn selects Kim and Jimmy's (Odenkirk) mercurial, shifting dynamics in the season 5 finale, "Something Unforgivable," in which the former proposes a rather devious plan to settle the Sandpiper suit and more than unsettle Howard. Or as the actress puts it, "the whole thing of Jimmy and Kim teetering on breaking up, talking each other back into staying, feeling each other out and then [Kim's shooting of] the finger guns."

Seehorn was particularly enamored with the unspoken language that Jimmy and Kim often conversed in. "It is such a product of what's not being [said] and speaking in code to each other that it requires three things: great writing, two actors that know each other and each other's characters extraordinarily well, and an audience that has followed that relationship closely enough that they also are getting what we're saying," she explains. "The whole thing is basically in code. That whole scene."

GIANCARLO ESPOSITO (Gus)

Giancarlo Esposito has a soft spot for the season 5 scene in which Gus heads down to Mexico to retrieve Mike (Jonathan Banks) after he is stabbed. (And viewers discovered that Gus has dedicated a fountain in this Mexican town to his former partner, James Martinez's Max.) "I love that scene because of the rustic, rural nature of it," he says. "And because of Mike's ability to be angry at him and his ability to absorb it and bring Mike back."

Speaking of his ability to absorb shots, Esposito selects a much nastier and more dangerous confrontation — the season 6 superlab showdown between Gus and Lalo (Tony Dalton), "where we have the opportunity for Lalo to be all of who he is, and for Gus to have finally been caught is a moment of great vulnerability."

Esposito can't stop thinking about the moment when Lalo fires a bullet into the chest of Gus. (Luckily, Gus is wearing a bulletproof vest. And, yes, he's also a key part of Breaking Bad, so you know he'll survive. Still…) "That moment is so powerful, where he gets shot in the chest and flies back against the industrial laundry," raves the actor. "I was shocked by that moment. I was like, 'Gus is gonna die!' and I'm him! I really went, 'He's just going to sink and die.' And then he comes back up angry as a snake that Lalo did that. And their final moments together! That has to be my favorite moment because he's off his game, he's off-kilter. He's not in control of the chaos as he would normally like to be."

BOB ODENKIRK (Jimmy/Saul/Gene)

While Odenkirk is enamored with the Jimmy-Kim relationship, here he singles out a moment in Jimmy's longest relationship (and most fraught) — the one with Chuck (Michael McKean).

Remember season 1's "Pimento," in which Jimmy confronts his older brother for betraying and sabotaging his chances at Hamlin Hamlin McGill? "It's the farthest I've gone into being someone else," says Odenkirk with a laugh. "If you could say 'quantifying,' it's the most acting I've ever done. And it felt very honest. It was just very rewarding to go that hard and to lose yourself that much in another person. And, of course, Michael was providing the other side of that. And that was where I first said, 'Okay, acting is kind of a cool trick — like a really cool trick — when it's hard.'"

MICHAEL MCKEAN (Chuck)

McKean first chooses the season 3 confrontation between Jimmy, Kim, and Chuck at the latter's house. "It was the only scene the three of us had together," he says. "And even though [Kim] had great misgivings about the way things were happening, she had to defend Jimmy and she busted Chuck on a few things. He kind of runs out of self-righteous cards, but it's very subtle, nothing changes by the end of the scene. Nobody changes, everyone's position pretty much remains the same, but on some level, Chuck knows that he's been sort of pantsed. He knows he's been outed as 'You're not doing this because it's the right thing. You're doing this because you have this problem with Jimmy.' I thought that was a really good scene."

But wait! He also has a particular fondness for the season 2 scene between Chuck and Kim in his office, when he tries to shed light on who Jimmy really is by telling her the story of how Jimmy embezzled money from their father's store when they were kids. "It's a terrific scene," he says. "And it's mostly me, which is not what's terrific about it. [Laughs] The fact is that even though she says a lot less, she pulls the scene along, because the audience wants to see what this is doing to her. The audience is buying everything Chuck was saying as being, 'I'm sure this happened, that's our Jimmy.' And all that stuff comes out later in the third season. That's another one of my favorites."

MICHAEL MANDO (Nacho)

The story of Nacho Varga leveled up each season, and, as Mando testifies, "he's really at his absolute best in that final season." While the actor points to Nacho's pained final phone call to his father, Manuel (Juan Carlos Cantu), as a huge highlight, not surprisingly he winds up journeying all the way to the End — for his character's epic final speech before sacrificially turning a gun on himself.

"That sums up who he is and what he's about," he says. "The soliloquy is the accumulation of everything he's learned, everything he's experienced, and everything he's become. And to see this character cross over into death on his own terms, without an iota of fear in his heart, and being full-heartedly invested in the love of his father, is just transcendent. It's like watching a caterpillar become a butterfly. And realizing that this guy became everything he wanted to be in that moment. I mean, he puts the fear of God in all these guys and they're just left stunned. Because they've seen what true power is, and power is not intimidation. They see the power of his love and they have no words."

PATRICK FABIAN (Howard)

Patrick Fabian saw a big emotional payday in the season 4 scene in which "Kim Wexler hands me my ass when I give her the check from Chuck. And the reason is because I love Rhea so much off camera, it was so hard to have her so angry and upset with me. It really hurt me. I love her so much as an actress. I thought it was really good work, but it took a lot out of me."

That said, the actor gravitates toward Howard's swan song — "my final scene playing with my friends, the guys who I had most of my work with," he says. "I can't think of a better way to go than to be able to play with your favorite actors on the show and then die in front of them. And then I let 'em clean up the mess."

TONY DALTON (Lalo)

Lalo delighted and terrified viewers (and everyone in the ABQ) over the second half of Better Call Saul, and perhaps his most chilling scene arrived near the end of it all, in the season 6 midseason finale. After he casually ended Howard's life with a bullet to the head, Lalo started calmly reciting to a terrified Jimmy and Kim instructions for how Jimmy will drive over to Gus' house to shoot him. ("Don't speed, don't weave, don't cut anyone off — just, you know, drive nice!") Jimmy and Kim pleaded their case to Lalo over who should do the deed, each volunteering the other because they worried that the person who stays back with Lalo will be killed.

"It starts off as drama, and then it goes into this kind of weird comedy, 'Hey, drive safe, be nice.' 'Take her!' What are you talking about?'" explains Dalton. "It's kind of like this 'Who's on first?' kind of thing. And then it goes serious again. It's interesting to go through all those genres in one scene, from drama to maybe a little bit of comedy even, and then back to this serious suspenseful ending where you don't know what's going to happen. it's an interesting exercise to do as an actor." Not to mention, a horrifying, mesmerizing one for viewers.

JONATHAN BANKS (Mike)

Banks begins by noting that he loved "the sunrises, the sunsets, the wild horses, the beauty of that endless landscape" that served as a backdrop to his six-season ride on Better Call Saul, but his favorite scene actually took place indoors. And like his stone-encrusted character, Banks was "broken" by Mike's confession to his daughter-in-law, Stacey (Kerry Condon), that he felt responsible for his son's death. "I got to do something besides just being the tough guy," he says proudly of his work in season 1's "Five-O."

This mammoth monologue is legendary for the devastating line, "I broke my boy." (Writer Gordon Smith had it in the script as "I broke my son," and Banks ad-libbed it as "I broke my boy.") "Even when I say it now, the idea of breaking your child's spirit is just… it's beyond painful," shares Banks. "It's incomprehensible. It's horrible." It is. And it made for one hell of a Mike-drop moment.

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