Meet Wynn Everett, the (Delightful) “Gus Fring” of ‘Chad Powers’

You may know Wynn Everett for playing the villainous Whitney Frost on Marvel’s Agent Carter. Well, her Chad Powers character Tricia Yeager may be even more evil than Frost’s alter-ego Madame Masque. Yeager’s closest TV comp comes from a totally different genre: Tricia is the “Gus Fring” (Giancarlo Esposito in Breaking Bad) of Chad Powers, per co-creators Michael Waldron (Loki) and Glen Powell (Hit Man).

Though Tricia, a wealthy booster for the fictional South Georgia Catfish, is way funnier (via Everett) than the stoic big bad in Breaking Bad, by the end of the Hulu sitcom’s second season (all six episodes now streaming!), we learn she can be just as devious. Oh, and like Fring, Yeager also uses a chicken farm as a front for her criminal enterprise.

Though Everett’s comedic chops steal many of the scenes she’s written into, the guys actually hired Wynn for her serious acting.

“Her tape was just so fun,” Waldron told The Hollywood Reporter. “She’s such a gifted dramatic actress, and so we just trusted that she would be hilarious with anything we gave her. I think the important thing is, you believe her. You’re like, ‘Yeah, this person exists. This character is all over the SEC.'”

Powell says he based Tricia on certain “silent puppeteers” he knows in college football. (Powell went to — and is still attending — the University of Texas if you want to go down the rabbit hole. He’s set to receive his undergraduate degree next spring. In a fun coincidence, Arch Manning, the nephew of Chad Powers executive producers Peyton and Eli Manning, is Powell’s beloved Longhorns’ starting quarterback.)

“What’s great is she can be saying the craziest things in the world, but then she can also shift into a very dramatic gear just as easily,” Waldron, a University of Georgia Bulldog, continued. “I can’t say enough good things about her.”

“She just bats 1.000 in the show,” Powell, who is about to play lifetime .340 hitter Lou Gehrig for Richard Linklater, told THR. “She can do anything. She really can.”

Powell, of course, also plays Russ Holliday/Powers, the two-faced titular protagonist of Chad Powers. (Even Holliday is a decent dude by now.) For much of the second season, Holliday/Powers battles backup quarterback Gerry (Colton Ryan) — not necessarily for the starting role, but more for Chad’s general existence and acceptance. Compared with Yaeger, however, Gerry is just a bump in the road to the National Championship.

Powers’ biggest problem (for now at least) is a 5’5″ working actress who (hybrid) homeschools her two daughters, Asher, 14 and Georgia, 12, in Atlanta with writer/poet husband Michael Albanese. Well, and a math tutor. (It’s a creative family: Asher directs short films and Georgia co-starred with mom in Steve Zahn’s She Dances. Zahn plays the head football coach on Chad Powers.)

Waldron recalled to THR a Chad Powers conversation he had with Powell: “If this is Breaking Bad, who is our Gus?” As it turned out, he says, “She’s been there all along.”

Powell and Waldron did not share their north star for Tricia with Everett, an Auburn alum, until basically the “very end” of season two production, she told THR. Waldron simply texted her a photo (below) of Gus Fring menacingly lording over Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Message received.

“Michael Waldron is a genius, and he pulls from the most unexpected places,” Everett said. “Like, I would never compare Trisha into the world of Breaking Bad, but… he sees it. He brings it all together.”

Should Chad Powers get a season three from Hulu, it really will all be brought together: Waldron and Powell have always planned Chad Powers as a three-TV-season show covering a single college football season. Here’s hoping Tricia Yeager doesn’t meet the same fate as Gus Fring, who gets half of his face blown off by a pipe bomb in Breaking Bad season four. Everett could pull it off no doubt, but her daughters wouldn’t like it one bit.

The Everett-Albanese girls (they have dad’s surname) are not huge fans of mom so often playing a bad guy (woman).

“They’re like, ‘Mommy, no, that’s very scary!’ Everett said. “But I love it.”

And clearly, Everett loves her home state — otherwise she would not have named her second daughter after it. Thanks to Georgia’s generous film tax incentives, Atlanta, where Everett was born and raised — and where Chad Powers shoots — is also a viable workplace.

“I’ve had the same agent for 20 years, at Gersh, and she would tell me, ‘Wynn, this business is a traveling business.’ You have to travel as an actor. We are the product,” Everett said. “When I moved back home, I said ‘I really, really have to stay in Atlanta. I have to stay here to be close to my children, and I’ll wait.’ And then it literally it was just a matter of time before Chad Powers fell into my lap, and then the other shows that have been here that I’ve gotten to work on — it’s just crazy that my little my hometown has become this hub of production.”