I’m very earthbound,” says Bob Odenkirk, looking, for want of a better word, entirely normal. Gone are the garish off-the-rack suits he paraded as Breaking Bad’s unscrupulous shyster Saul Goodman; in their stead is a muted greyish sweater, as he perches on the edge of a chair in a Soho hotel room. “I’m a dad, I’m a husband, and I’m a guy who walks his dog a couple times a day. A guy who clumsily tries to make things. But within the qualifier of ‘normal’, there’s a pretty wide range of human behaviour,” he adds. “Which is to say… everybody should have a few aberrations.”
Here’s one aberration that marks Odenkirk out from the crowd: yelling. From his early days on HBO’s cult sketch comedy Mr Show, through to the life-and-death hijinks of Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, the 63-year-old has proved himself to be one of the best and funniest yellers on planet earth. There are entire compilations on YouTube simply of Bob Odenkirk yelling – everything from a slick, sleazy fury to a sort of emasculated, pyrrhic bellow. Today, unsurprisingly, there’s none of that. His Illinois lilt is muffled and a little scratchy, if anything.
Just what “normal” means is a pertinent question for Odenkirk, Normal being the name of his latest film. In a similar vein to 2021’s Nobody and its sequel – gritty, John Wickian action thrillers that incongruously cast Odenkirk as a grizzled man of violence – Normal sees him play a docile lawman who is sent to a backwater American town after the death of its old sheriff. Normal is both the name of the town, and, it seems, a description of it. Before long, however, things all get a bit Hot Fuzz.
At the start of our interview, he asks if I watched Normal in a cinema. I tell him I watched it online, via a screener. “F***!” he exclaims. “It’s really fun with an audience. All those orchestrated moments of violence, when things start popping off. I’m going to watch it with an audience again tonight – it’s my 11th time.”
Directed by Ben Wheatley (Sightseers; Meg 2: The Trench), Normal is a slight tonal departure from Nobody. It’s funnier and dafter – “wearing a smirk from beginning to end”, Odenkirk says. “Have you ever seen the film Final Destination? There are some kills in Normal that Ben referred to as ‘Final Destination kills’.”
It’s not entirely new territory for Odenkirk: mustachioed and uniform-clad, he looks much as he did in the first season of Fargo in 2014. But it’s strange seeing him play someone so unassuming. Historically, Odenkirk gravitated towards the brash and the sharklike. When he was coming up in the Nineties – as an amoral, cocaine-snorting agent on The Larry Sanders Show, or as any number of one-off parts on Mr Show (the series he co-created with David Cross, which included Sarah Silverman and Jack Black among its players) – many of his characters had what he describes as a “duplicitous, insensitive” quality. Or to put it another way: “Quite a few of my characters have been pricks.”
There is, he admits, “a forcefulness of personality to them that I probably have myself. I don’t think I’m ever as inconsiderate or insensitive as they are, but it’s not something completely foreign to me.”
It’s odd, though, I suggest, that Odenkirk’s public image seems so removed from most of his characters. He is a man who attracts an enormous amount of goodwill, and is about as universally liked as they come (if social media is anything to go by). Often, you hear about actors bearing the brunt of their characters’ transgressions: Mad Men’s January Jones was berated in the street after Betty Draper cheated on her husband; Ghostbusters hard-arse William Atherton said he couldn’t walk into a bar without people trying to fight him. Yet when it comes to Odenkirk, nothing seems to stick.
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“Dude, if you can figure it out, tell me,” he says. “I don’t know. I’m very thankful that people feel warmly towards me – but I agree with you.”
Then again, there’s always been a dormant humanity to him, even in his most obnoxious creations. Perhaps it was 2019’s Little Women that tipped the scales of public opinion – Greta Gerwig picking up on Odenkirk’s innate geniality to cast him, somewhat against type, as the benevolent Father March. (“My little women,” he coos, memorably, when he returns from war unsavaged.) Or indeed, Better Call Saul (2015 to 2022), which took Saul Goodman – a superlative caricature of a low-rent legal huckster – and reimagined him as Jimmy McGill, a tragicomic figure with astounding dimensionality.
It was early on in Saul, in a dramatic scene where Jimmy confronts his brother (played by Michael McKean) for impeding his legal career, when Odenkirk first realised just how much he had been given to work with. “It wasn’t just emotion, just wanting to cry on TV – because I don’t,” he says. “But the level of earnest self-revelation that goes on… it’s just wild. I never deserved to get that kind of part. I did nothing to earn that.”
To a large extent, his rich, affecting performance proves otherwise. But it remains a barbed injustice that Odenkirk never won an Emmy for the role despite six nominations. The series as a whole was overlooked, too – just two wins from 55 nominations, its run having straddled HBO’s twin juggernauts Game of Thrones and Succession. When I ask if that stung, Odenkirk all but scoffs. “I mean, it was respected and loved by critics and the viewing public. It did way better than any of us expected.
“It’s a weird scenario with awards,” he continues. “You know, I’ll bet you we didn’t get some votes because people thought we’d already won them. Because it felt like that! It felt like we won everything. So it doesn’t matter. I have two Emmys, by the way.” (He does, both for writing – one when he worked on Saturday Night Live in 1989, the other for The Ben Stiller Show in 1993.) “Someday, when I’m rich enough to fly on private jets, I’ll take my awards with me.”
This last remark is a joke, one of only a few that Odenkirk cracks over the course of our conversation. It could well be jet lag, but he seems overall in a straightfaced, sober mode today. When I ask him about the extravagant violence in Normal, he responds with a sort of earnest treatise on the importance of artistic licence. “A thing that’s in a play, or a stand-up show, or a film, is not happening in the real world,” he says. “It’s a presentation of words, of actions, and that’s all it is. It’s an interpretation of life, always.
“I don’t love gruesome onscreen deaths, but I see that people do,” he adds. “And I don’t make movies alone for myself. And so I have no issue with as many guns as you want to use in a movie. Ben certainly loves his gleeful, macabre, over-the-top kills, and he’s not alone.”
Odenkirk’s recent pivot to action stardom saw him acquaint himself with gun culture. When he was growing up, firearms were a foreign object: “I shot a rifle when I was in Boy Scouts, and my father had a pistol in the sock drawer that he didn’t take care of very well. It wasn’t there for long – at some point, my mom made him get it out the house; I don’t think there were any bullets for it.”
He has spoken – and written – about his father before: a rage-prone, often absent figure. As a child in Naperville, Illinois, Odenkirk was one of seven siblings. (His brother Bill worked on Mr Show, and The Simpsons.) What this gave him, first and foremost, was an audience to perform to – “the first audience I ever had. We stood up at dinner and did little scenes from our day, and I would get laughs. The camaraderie was a great comfort.”
Now, he has kids of his own, with his wife, film producer Naomi Yomtov. His son Nate is a writer, and his daughter Erin produces shows on stage. I wonder what they make of films like Normal, of their father’s attempts to become Naperville’s answer to Jason Statham. “They clearly get a kick out of it,” he says. “I think my son would prefer I go back to comedy. He’d rather hear about that than action movies.”
To some extent, anything Odenkirk decides to pursue – comedy or drama, sketches or a Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross – feels like a gift. In July 2021, Odenkirk collapsed while filming Better Call Saul, having suffered a “widowmaker” heart attack, and nearly died. He recoils when I ask if he’s sick of talking about it. “I am,” he says, “but it’s a serious issue and it’s understandable that people are curious about it.”
Heart attacks are a distressing fact of life: in the US, someone has one every 40 seconds. But Odenkirk’s heart attack was not an everyday situation. While he was being rushed to hospital, the eyes of the world were fixed on him. He was all that people seemed to be talking about on social media. Liveblogs spent hours delivering constant non-updates, right up until the moment his son shared a solacing five-word tweet: “He’s going to be OK.”
It’s almost hard to fathom, I say, what it must be like knowing that your medical emergency was being followed, heart-in-mouth, by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. “I heard about it,” Odenkirk says. “The reaction may have been a little outsized because of circumstance. Social media, the novelty of being able to keep track of somebody like that, was part of what drove it. And the surprise of it – I was in good shape.
“The thing you brought up earlier is the more curious [part],” he continues. “The kindness and warmth that people feel towards me, and share with me all the time. Why? I get pissed off, and frustrated, and I’m shortsighted, and I’m every bad thing that a person can be. I don’t know. I’m obviously very thankful that that’s how people feel towards me, and part of it is that they just decided ‘He’s a good guy.’ I don’t know the origin of it.”
I don’t know the origin of it either. But the decision, it seems, is final. Bob Odenkirk has been anointed as a people’s darling. And despite his protestations, the title seems to fit.
‘Normal’ is in cinemas
