{"id":454906,"date":"2026-05-18T13:22:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T13:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/454906\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T13:22:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T13:22:18","slug":"bob-odenkirk-breaking-bad-was-a-show-that-i-was-surprised-they-kept-on-the-air-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/454906\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Odenkirk: \u2018Breaking Bad was a show that I was surprised they kept on the air\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Odenkirk<\/a>, star of Better Call Saul and the outlandish action comedy Nobody, is gearing up for the ninth \u2013 possibly 10th \u2013 viewing of his new film. It\u2019s brave territory for an actor who doesn\u2019t like to see himself on screen.<\/p>\n

The feature is \u201cjust so much fun to watch with other people\u201d, he tells me. \u201cI\u2019ve never made anything except Mr Show, a sketch comedy show that I did, that I personally was very happy to sit with an audience and watch. Everything else is more nerve-racking than it is fun. But this is just fun as hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normal arrives in cinemas with a fine pedigree and the most hilariously violent scene ever set in a haberdashery. Based on a story co-written by Odenkirk, the film was directed by Ben Wheatley, the British innovator behind Kill List and A Field in England, and written by Derek Kolstad, the creator of John Wick. <\/p>\n

Odenkirk is comically unflappable as Ulysses Richardson, a weary interim sheriff who arrives in the tiny frozen town of Normal, Minnesota, hoping for six quiet weeks of paperwork and emotional recovery after a professional scandal and a broken marriage. Instead he discovers a townwide conspiracy involving the yakuza, corrupt locals led by Henry Winkler\u2019s mayor, a heavily armed wool shop and enough illegal weaponry to facilitate a small revolution. <\/p>\n

What begins as a bungled bank robbery escalates into an hour-long bloodbath in which virtually every resident of Normal starts shooting at every other resident of Normal. Picture John Wick with more gunplay, more black humour and a higher body count.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an independently financed film,\u201d Odenkirk says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s how we were able to do that. I feel like we asked ourselves, \u2018You know, should we go to a studio? There\u2019s so much about it that a studio would like.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cBut a studio would have said, \u2018Pick a lane.\u2019 They would have said, \u2018Guys, what are you? Are you a horror film? Are you a suspense film? Are you an action film? If you\u2019re an action film, get the action going and keep it going. Get back to it.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cThis goes to broad comic violence, then it comes back down, then it goes back up. It\u2019s wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odenkirk is full of surprises. Most Hollywood actors guesting on genealogy shows feign amazement on discovering an ancestor who arrived on a coffin ship. Odenkirk, who has German and Irish Catholic heritage, basically won the PBS show Finding Your Roots by discovering that he\u2019s an 11th cousin of the British monarch, King Charles.<\/p>\n

His career is similarly unpredictable. Having started as a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live, he has stealthily built an acting CV that features such variety as Wayne\u2019s World II, Alexander Payne\u2019s Nebraska and Greta Gerwig\u2019s Little Women. He was in his 50s before Breaking Bad made him something of a household name.<\/p>\n

\"BreakingBreaking Bad: Bryan Cranston as Walter White and Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman. Photograph: Ursula Coyote\/AMC <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s better that way,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a great book out right now by Lena Dunham called Famesick<\/a>. She has a lot of issues that have nothing to do with her fame but with the degree of that fame. The way it hit her so strongly at such a young age. It was so difficult. It\u2019s easier when you are older. You know what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

His journey to billboards and headlining roles has been very different. For years Odenkirk occupied one of the most noble jobs in show business: making other people look brilliant. <\/p>\n

At Saturday Night Live he wrote for the kind of performers \u2013 Chris Farley, Dana Carvey, Chris Rock \u2013 who could turn a good sketch into television history. At The Ben Stiller Show and The Larry Sanders Show he became part of a generation of comedy writers who quietly rewired American humour from the wings, sanding down punchlines until they sounded effortless. <\/p>\n

\u201cI saw lots of very good friends become hugely famous: Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller,\u201d he says. \u201cI got to see it from up close, and I understood the way it was a thing that happens at you, not for you or with you. It just happens at you.\u201d<\/p>\n

He remains circumspect about his current profile.<\/p>\n

\"BetterBetter Call Saul: Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn in season three. Photograph: Michele K Short\/Netflix <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not famous,\u201d he says. \u201cThings I\u2019ve worked on are famous. Breaking Bad is famous. Better Call Saul is famous. That\u2019s not me. That\u2019s a whole bunch of people. That\u2019s a whole bunch of people\u2019s work being appreciated. I\u2019m in those projects, and I\u2019m a focal point, but that\u2019s not really me that\u2019s being celebrated. And that\u2019s kind of always true for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odenkirk grew up in Naperville, near Chicago, the second of seven children in a loud, funny, volatile Catholic household where storytelling functioned as both entertainment and survival mechanism. His father, an alcoholic who left the family when Odenkirk was 12, remained a lasting source of anger and gravity in his work; his mother supplied warmth, devout faith and \u201ca very good laugh\u201d.<\/p>\n

As a teenager Odenkirk devoured Kerouac and dreamed of escaping suburbia for stranger, sharper worlds. By the time he arrived at Saturday Night Live, in the late 1980s, he had already developed the sensibility that would define his comedy: equal parts Midwestern eyerolling, intellectual silliness and suppressed Catholic guilt. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad was a difficult guy, but he was funny,\u201d Odenkirk says. \u201cHe made wisecracks all the time. My mum was very funny. Then we also had seven kids in our family, so there was an audience, essentially, at dinner every night to tell stories to and do characters from your day. We had this built-in theatre to perform in called our kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wishes Saturday Night Live had been that fun. By the time he crossed the continent to Los Angeles he found, bizarrely, that Hollywood offered a more civilised working environment.<\/p>\n

\"Normal:Normal: Bob Odenkirk and Jess McLeod. Photograph: Magnolia Pictures <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the way SNL is managed, which is to say it\u2019s not managed,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just, \u2018Good luck. See you on Saturday. Hope there\u2019s a show when we show up.\u2019 It\u2019s such an unbounded free-for-all. It makes it hard. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe longer you spend doing it, the less you freak out. \u2018There\u2019s a goddamn show on Saturday night. What are we doing? It\u2019s Wednesday. We\u2019ve got nothing.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cI loved Hollywood. I worked on different TV shows. I drove home. I parked my car. I walked across a little lawn to a little house that I lived in.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Better Call Saul\u2019s Bob Odenkirk: \u2018I can go from zero to 80 on the rage scale\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Jimmy McGill, the hustling small-time lawyer who gradually transforms into Saul Goodman across Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, feels in many ways like the role Odenkirk had been unconsciously preparing for all along. Jimmy is funny, fast-talking and deeply performative, but beneath the seat-of-pants charisma lurks something darker: shame, self-deceit and a pathological need for acceptance.<\/p>\n

Goodman was originally written as a four-episode arc in the second season of Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan, its showrunner, and Peter Gould, a key writer, were so impressed that they promoted the character and gave him a spin-off series.<\/p>\n

\u201cBreaking Bad was a show that I was surprised they kept on the air,\u201d Odenkirk says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a success. The fame of that show grew exponentially. And then after three seasons we\u2019re on Netflix, and people had binged all three of them. When that fourth season came on, it was a cultural phenomenon. And a joy to be a part of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Better Call Saul was nominated for 53 Emmys and earned Odenkirk a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But he was not unhappy to wave goodbye to his most successful role to date.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t like I was running from him, but I got into this business, it\u2019s pretty apparent from my resum\u00e9, to do different things next time,\u201d he says. \u201cSo right now I\u2019m working on a sitcom show that my son wrote. I\u2019m working on a play with my friend David Cross. We\u2019re working on a children\u2019s book with my daughter. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always wanting to do something that is fundamentally a fair number of degrees away from whatever I just did. I want that variety. It was hard to be in that guy for as long as we needed to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Odenkirk was hospitalised in Albuquerque in 2021, after having a heart attack<\/a> on the set of the sixth season of Better Call Saul. Crew members and medical staff performed CPR and used a defibrillator before he was taken to hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cI exercised a lot,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the fact that I exercised as much as I did meant that the tributaries to my heart were a little bit enlarged. And that meant that the CPR fed my heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cTalking about the heart attack, people say, \u2018Well, have you talked about it enough?\u2019 And I have. But if you want to hear anything of value to you in my story, it\u2019s that: get to work. If you\u2019re doing cardio, if you\u2019re doing exercise, you\u2019re strengthening everything around your heart, so that if you have an incident you\u2019ll survive it better than you would otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Saul great, man: A potent finale brings the Breaking Bad universe to a closeOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Odenkirk\u2019s late emergence as a movie action hero adds another plot twist to his career. In 2020 he began training with the martial artist and stuntman Daniel Bernhardt, another John Wick alumnus, to prepare for Nobody. For Normal, Odenkirk performed most of his own stunts.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you told me I\u2019d be doing this 10 years ago, I would have thought you are out of your freaking mind,\u201d he says. \u201cBut then it occurred to me that an action character never quits. He\u2019s got his heart, he\u2019s chasing his goals, he\u2019s trying to protect the things he loves, and he keeps getting knocked down, sometimes physically knocked down. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s an action character, even when he doesn\u2019t fight. And I\u2019m willing to learn to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normal is in cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bob Odenkirk, star of Better Call Saul and the outlandish action comedy Nobody, is gearing up for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[32819,9082,79115,93,61,60,12648,73457],"class_list":["post-454906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ben-stiller","tag-bob-odenkirk","tag-chris-rock","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lena-dunham","tag-vince-gilligan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}