What I’ve Learned: Bob Odenkirk

Bob Odenkirk, sixty-two, spent most of his career honing the craft of sketch comedy before earning a new level of fame as a dramatic lead and action star. In the nineties he cocreated, with David Cross, the sketch comedy series Mr. Show with Bob and David. Odenkirk later created the character of Saul Goodman on the series Breaking Bad, then reprised the role for six seasons, starting in 2015, in the critically acclaimed spin-off Better Call Saul. Along the way, in July 2021, he survived a near-fatal heart attack. That same year, he starred in the hit action-thriller movie Nobody. Odenkirk, who lives in Los Angeles, spoke to Esquire recently while in New York, where he was making his Broadway debut in a revival of the play Glengarry Glen Ross. This summer he stars in Nobody 2.

Boy, I do not have worldly wisdom to give anyone. It’s a strange moment for me. I feel more uncertain than I have in a long time about who I am and what I’m trying to do. I’ve been out of my element for about fifteen years now, starting with Better Call Saul. I had to lead this dramatic show, and I had to learn on the job. And then I did an action movie called Nobody.

I’m coming to the end of a chapter where I redefined myself. But I’m still not sure what it means. Was it a bit of a lark?

One of my qualities onscreen is that I’m strangely earnest. My earnestness weirdly doesn’t lend itself as well to comedy, which is what I’ve done for most of my career. It fits better in a drama. The mysterious quality of I’m not sure where this guy’s coming from.

What can I do? I can take a risk. Where does that come from? I honestly think it comes from foolishness.

If I wanted to ennoble that, I would say it’s humility, which comes down to this: Look, I’m not that important. If I fail, so what? If I make an ass of myself, I’ll just have to suffer that and go on. And who gives a shit? Why is that so bad?

Most movies don’t work. They just don’t. Out of a hundred movies, there’s like two classics in there. There are twelve worth seeing. There’s another fifteen that are fine. And then the rest are just a mess.

If you don’t want to take risks, don’t be in this business. You know, people who make their work too precious and take too long to put it out, I always want to say, What do you think you’re making?

A creative partnership like I have with David Cross is like magic, pure magic, that you cannot label or find. It’s not unlike a marriage. I could sit here and list things that I think make us great partners. But there’s just a dimension of blind trust and love that that you can’t put a label to. If you’re not stupid, you have to appreciate that and respect it and be thankful for it.

There’s nothing more entertaining than kids. No movie. No story. Nothing in my mind is as funny and entertaining. Difficult, sure. But come on, they’re a fucking riot.

My dad’s indiscretions were so self-evident and public. He was just a black hole of presence and of leadership. He was just a zero.

The lessons I got from my mom that were of value to being a decent person are self-evident. She worked her ass off. She was mission oriented, which is to say: Do the laundry, get the food on the table, get the kids where they’re going.

When you’re a little kid and you live in a fairly nice neighborhood but you drink powdered milk, you don’t quite know: Do we have money, or do we have no money? I think we have no money, but does that mean we’re going be living in a car next week? Your life is unsteady. You’re very wobbly inside.

We watched The Carol Burnett Show. I didn’t really know consciously what I was getting from that. When I think back on it, you saw adults making each other laugh and you’re happy to feel that warmth from the TV. It’s a wonderful thing to give to the audience, that warmth. That’s genuine.

I saw Monty Python when I was eleven, and it was absolutely like the world was peeled back. The veneer of things being legitimate was laid bare as being a lie by Monty Python.

One of the weird things about where I’m at now is that I don’t know what the next mission is. What’s the next load of laundry? There’s no fucking laundry to do.

I didn’t deserve half of what I have. You know, I can’t pretend like I have to engineer some great career. I’m so far past anything I had any right to dream of.

So I guess I’ve got to work on myself—which is that wonderful thing people do when they have enough money and they’re honest about the fact that the universe has been really good to them. And anything that remains that’s a discrepancy or an unsettling feeling is all theirs.

In a real fight I would, upon the advice of every single stunt man I’ve ever worked with, get the fuck out of that room as fast as I can. Every one of them will tell you, the first thing you do in a fight is get away from the fight. Fights are not fun and they’re not good, and almost no one wins. It’s not a movie.

A lot of what you do for screen fighting goes against the basic rules of actual fighting. It’s weird because you build screen fighting out of real fight moves. But you take it to a bigger, broader place that is dangerous if you’re actually fighting. So when you swing a punch, you go big and as wide as you can. Which not a good idea in a real fight, because now you’re way open.

I’m not a violent person. I’m a liberal, I guess. I think we can have more gun control. Let’s do it. But I had two break-ins. One in particular was really damaging and disturbing. Those feelings of anger and rage toward the person who did that stay with you. And I thought that I could make use of those in a movie.

The training for the movie Nobody helped me survive the heart attack. I have almost no scarring on my heart, which is crazy after what happened to me. One of the feeder veins to my widow-maker was shut down completely.

That incident kicked off a change that is still happening now. It’s not a new chapter; it’s a new book of my life. I had some memory challenges that were difficult for a little while. But more than difficult, they were wonderful.

For weeks, I was getting memory back. Every day I was putting it together: Oh, I had a heart attack. Oh, right, I’m an actor. These are my kids.

But it was a wonderful thing to wake up every day and the world was fresh. I didn’t have the anxieties and worries of yesterday flooding my brain every morning. I was able to see the world and be present in a way that was just fucking great. I mean, the world was fucking great. I just loved being alive. And I remember thinking, I’ve got to remember this.