hen Bob Odenkirk’s agent fi rst called him about
playing an oily bus-stop-ad lawyer named Saul
Goodman on ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ — at the time a
little-watched cable show in production on its
second season — Odenkirk hadn’t seen a minute
of it, much less heard about it. But he readily
accepted the gig.
He was in no position to turn down good work
— even if it was a minor role, intended to last
only a few episodes. ‘‘I needed money!’’ he told
me. Odenkirk’s pedigree was in comedy, where
he enjoyed a paradoxical status: legendary and
obscure. He studied improv under the visionary
teacher Del Close and performed for packed
crowds at Second City alongside buddies like
Chris Farley. He had a hand in writing sketches
that helped defi ne the ’90s era of ‘‘Saturday Night
Live.’’ He acted on ‘‘The Larry Sanders Show’’
(excellent and underseen), wrote for ‘‘Get a Life’’
(excellent and canceled swiftly) and did both for
‘‘The Ben Stiller Show’’ (excellent and canceled
even more swiftly) and for one of the all-time-
great American sketch series, ‘‘Mr. Show,’’ a
cult hit that he created for HBO in 1995 with
his friend David Cross. When it ended after four
seasons, Odenkirk tried directing feature fi lms
with decidedly mixed results, failed to get a litany
of other projects off the ground and turned to
mentoring younger talents whose love of sketch
comedy matched his own.
So when the off er came in 2009, he fl ew from
Los Angeles to Albuquerque, watching ‘‘Break-
ing Bad’’ — about a mild-mannered New Mexi-
co chemistry teacher named Walter White who
receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and, in the
midlife crisis that ensues, becomes a coldly cal-
culating meth kingpin — for the fi rst time on the
plane. ‘‘I didn’t even watch a whole episode, but I
didn’t need to, I got it,’’ Odenkirk recalled. He also
didn’t bother to memorize the reams of cascading,
hucksterish dialogue that the writer Peter Gould
had crafted for him, certain that these lines would
be cut way down by the time he stepped on set.
They weren’t. And, 12 years later, on a Fri-
day night this December, Odenkirk was still in
Albuquerque, still playing Saul Goodman. The
role had not merely changed his life but, to a
signifi cant and not-unwelcome degree, com-
mandeered it.
‘‘Breaking Bad’’ grew into a prestige-TV-
defi ning smash on the order of ‘‘The Sopra-
nos’’ and ‘‘Mad Men.’’ And Saul proved such an
enjoyable part of it that, when the series ended,
its creator, Vince Gilligan, decided his next TV
project would be a prequel, created with Gould
and titled ‘‘Better Call Saul,’’ focused on the sur-
prisingly poignant question of how this scumbag
lawyer came to be quite so scummy.
My fi rst glimpse of Odenkirk came via a
pair of monitors wedged into the open garage
of a suburban home, on the northeast side of
town. It was a punishingly cold evening, which
seemed even colder thanks to a scattering of fake
snow arranged outside the house. Crew mem-
bers huddled in winter coats, and production
vehicles sat humming up and down the block.
Odenkirk, who’d recently turned 59, was here
to shoot a scene from an episode that will air
later this year during the show’s sixth and fi nal
season. Gilligan himself was on hand to direct,
adding to the last-hurrah ambience: ‘‘We have to
be out of here tonight,’’ Gilligan told me in the
garage, eating a slice of pizza from the catering
truck before darting back inside, ‘‘so there’s a
little time pressure.’’
It was Odenkirk’s fourth consecutive night
shooting in the house, his workday starting around
dusk and ending around dawn. But when I said
hello to him between setups in a spare bedroom,
where he sat reading Mel Brooks’s autobiography,
he was feeling voluble and introspective. ‘‘This
has been the biggest thing in my life,’’ Odenkirk
told me from behind a Covid-protocol face shield,
‘‘and it’s emotional to say goodbye to it, and to all
these people I’ve been working with for so many
years.’’ He grinned, then added, ‘‘I guess peoplewho work on, you know, ‘N.C.I.S.’ would say the
same thing. But would they mean it?’’
If ‘‘Better Call Saul’’ hasn’t been a hit on quite
the epochal scale of ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ — few things
are — it might wind up being the greater artistic
achievement. Odenkirk and the show’s writers
are close to pulling off a tricky double transfor-
mation: First, they wound Saul back from the
two-dimensional opportunity for levity he was on
‘‘Breaking Bad’’ into a tragicomic antihero called
Jimmy McGill — the man Saul Goodman used to
be, who wrestles with near-pathological unscru-
pulousness while trying to win the respect of a
prideful older brother (Michael McKean) and a
devoted girlfriend and fellow lawyer (Rhea See-
horn) whose belief in him he can’t seem to help
betray. And then they started to turn Jimmy,
piece by piece, back into Saul again.
The show’s central question is whether a
fl awed person can truly change for the better,
and the implicit answer, given that we know who
Jimmy is on his way to becoming, is grim. The
result has been a decade-plus, nonlinear exper-
iment in character development spanning mul-
tiple seasons of two diff erent series, the closest
precedent to which might be Michael Apted’s
‘‘Up’’ documentaries. Emmy voters nominated
Odenkirk for best lead actor in a drama four
times, and you can imagine the shock of those
who knew him from ‘‘Mr. Show’’: How did the
guy who did that manage to do this?
Talking in the spare bedroom, Odenkirk was
dry and earnest, underscoring that the lunatic
places he has been able to push himself onscreen
are exactly that: places he pushes himself. Now,
with the role that made him an unlikely star fi nal-
ly ending, it was clear that Odenkirk was ready
to push somewhere new. He’d parlayed a frus-
trating yet fruitful comedy- writing career into
a frustrating yet fruitful comedy- acting career,
pivoted to a frustrating and unfruitful directing
career, then stumbled into a celebrated dramatic-
acting career so fruitful that Alexander Payne
(‘‘Nebraska’’), Greta Gerwig (‘‘Little Women’’)
and Steven Spielberg (‘‘The Post’’) all cast him in
movies. Odenkirk, of course, foresaw none of
this, nor that he would write a memoir of his life,
‘‘Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,’’ to be pub-
lished next month by Random House — much
less that he would star in an action movie called
‘‘Nobody,’’ written by the creator of ‘‘John Wick,’’
which grossed $55 million worldwide last year,
about an ex-government assassin who, seeking
revenge after a home invasion, leaves a trail of
destruction that puts his family in far more dan-
ger than the initial intruders ever did.
‘‘I’ve done all these diff erent things, and there’s
been a great degree of failure,’’ Odenkirk told
me later, adding, ‘‘I don’t wanna be a dilettante.
I would feel horrible if that’s how I was character-
ized.’’ He paused, then assumed a tone of mock
grandiosity. ‘‘Or!’’ he said, smiling. ‘‘Am I the best
dilettante that ever lived?’’28 2.13.22
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