MICHAEL MCKEAN: It’s exciting to run this obstacle course that Vince, Peter, Tom, Gennifer, and the entire writing staff lay out for us every year. It’s completely exhilarating. It’s the best writing on TV. It’s great!

I was kind of blown away by just how far Chuck goes this season and how calculated his plan is. Was it surprising at all to see how quickly the show was launching into this schism in their relationship this year?

No. No, I think the heartbeat started going up at the end of last season. You know, if you strip away everything else there are only two stories: revenge and redemption. So it’s kind of a little of both. We’re fighting both. I think that Chuck’s cast himself as the avenger and put his considerable brain to work on that. I just think that it’s been really fun—as you watch this plot that revolves around the tape recording—as I read about it serially as it was happening I thought, well the interesting thing about this is that this plan probably shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Here’s this guy who’s a lawyer. He’s used to thinking somewhat schematically and manipulating people’s emotions, so he’s probably pretty good at this. But still, the human element there with Ernesto and whether he can be counted on to screw the pooch and tell Jimmy because he just as easily could have had enough with the McGill brothers and gone to find another job. I don’t know! I don’t know how it’s going to work. It still works supremely well, but I’m still expecting Jimmy to come sneaking in the middle of the night to steal the tape, which is why Chuck now has things like a man on guard.

Sure, and it keeps developing as a continually complicated relationship. I love that Chuck and Jimmy is such a fundamental relationship to the series, yet it’s managed to change and evolve each season, too.

Yes! It’s great. I think it’s the notion of thinking of a series as a finite thing. As Vince and Peter did with Breaking Bad. They said this is a five-year show and it ends. They went a little longer than that, but it’s a little remarkable how much they could stick to their guns there. It’s just thinking about things like a big novel. After I finished the third season I had to go right to New York for this play I’m doing and I didn’t really have time to digest the season. I’ve still yet to see a single frame of it, so it’s going to be very interesting for me to go back to it. It feels like for three years in a row I’ve made a really long movie and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a pretty good part in this movie. But then I look at the full story—I don’t think it’s even been a full year yet in the show’s timeline. So it’s been three years, but fur the story it’s not, it’s just a handful of months. I think that’s fascinating.