The New York Times Magazine 41just went down.’’ He added, ‘‘Rhea said I started
turning bluish-gray right away.’’
The soundstages ‘‘Better Call Saul’’ calls home
are ‘‘massive,’’ Odenkirk said. After a few agoniz-
ingly long minutes, the show’s health safety super-
visor, Rosa Estrada, and an assistant director, Angie
Meyer, arrived, administering CPR and hooking
him up to an automated defi brillator. It zapped
him once, then once more, producing an irregular
pulse that quickly disappeared. ‘‘The third time,’’
Odenkirk said, ‘‘it got me that rhythm back.’’
An ambulance took him to Presbyterian Hos-
pital in Albuquerque, ‘‘and around 5 a.m. the
next morning they went through right here’’ —
Odenkirk showed me a scar on his wrist — ‘‘and
blew up the little balloons and knocked out that
plaque and left stents in two places.’’ Later that
morning, Odenkirk’s wife and children arrived
in Albuquerque, staying with him at the hospital
as he recovered for the next week.
Odenkirk has no memory of any of this. He
cobbled together his account from Seehorn and
the others who helped save his life.
‘‘That’s its own weirdness,’’ Seehorn said.
‘‘You didn’t have a near-death experience —
you’re told you had one.’’
Seehorn asked Odenkirk how the night shoots
had been going, commiserating about the disori-
entation of keeping nocturnal hours. ‘‘I had to do
it with Vince,’’ she said, ‘‘when I go out to — ’’ here,
she whispered something Kim does this coming
season, that, if I heard correctly, was just enough
of a spoiler to omit here. ‘‘My character doesn’t
usually do things at night,’’ she told me. ‘‘Not out-
side. She’s like an indoor cat! But this year I had
things to do that usually only Bob does.’’
Seehorn is a deft, sensitive actor, and her per-
formance opposite Odenkirk, along with Michael
McKean’s, constitutes the show’s emotional core.
Whereas ‘‘Breaking Bad’’ explored an operatic
birth-of-a-supervillain premise, ‘‘Better Call Saul’’
works in a more muted — and, to me, more aff ect-
ing — register. Seehorn’s Kim is a Type A striver
with a rebellious streak; she wants to do work
more meaningful than representing a regional
bank and fi nds something alluring in Jimmy’s
reckless heterodoxy. Meanwhile, McKean’s
Chuck McGill, a revered senior partner at the
type of high-powered law fi rm that necessarily
represents an array of high-powered malefac-
tors, looks down on his brother with mistrust
and scorn and tries to get Kim to do the same.
These three characters love one another, and help
one another, and yet they continually hurt one
another too, in ways that can be as devastating
as they can be small.
Contrasting the two series, Peter Gould told
me that ‘‘Better Call Saul’’ is ‘‘about a guy who, in
a lot of ways, really wants to be loved and feels
rejection tremendously, more than he wants to
show. Walter White maybe fi nds out that what he
really wants is power, and he’s very happy to have
people fear him, but Jimmy wants love, and even
when he’s trying to intimidate people, there’s an
undercurrent of wanting approval and accep-
tance. And it’s something he never quite gets.’’Odenkirk pointed out the window toward the
Sandia Mountains. If we hustled, he told me, we
could fi t in a hike before Gould showed up. We
drove to a trailhead Odenkirk knows and loves,
he traded his sneakers for hiking boots and we
began climbing. ‘‘We might want to hustle just
to warm up,’’ he said, proceeding to charge up
1,015 feet of elevation on a snowy mountain trail
a matter of months after his collapse.
As we walked, I mentioned one of my favorite
things he did in recent years. It’s a sketch on
Tim Robinson’s excellent Netfl ix series, ‘‘I Think
You Should Leave,’’ in which Odenkirk plays a
sad-sack guy enjoying a lonely meal at a diner,
who desperately pressures a stranger and his
child, one table over, to help him pretend that
his life isn’t as bleak as it is — to corroborate the
fantasy that he has friends, owns ‘‘every kind of
classic car,’’ including ‘‘doubles’’ and ‘‘triples’’
of some, that he doesn’t live in a hotel and that
he married an ex-model whose face he fi rst saw
hanging on a poster in his garage.
It’s a fantastic sketch that, despite its prepos-
terousness, undoes any neat distinction invoked
in the title of Odenkirk’s memoir between
‘‘comedy’’ and ‘‘drama.’’ To tweak Odenkirk’s
paraphrase of Idle, it’s comedy with despair in
it. With snow crunching underfoot and coni-
fers looming above us, I asked Odenkirk if he
thought he could have mustered a performance
like that before ‘‘Better Call Saul.’’
‘‘I think I’ve gotten more capable of striking
a tone of melancholy and making it honest in
a comedy piece,’’ he said. He thought back to
his days acting opposite Farley, at Second City.
‘‘I actually remember being onstage with Chris
and Jill Talley once, doing an improv scene, and
thinking to myself, If I was in the audience, I’d
be watching them, not me. And I kept thinking,
as we were doing the scene, If I was in a drama,
I could be the funniest guy, and the way you’re
watching Chris Farley in this scene, you’d be
watching me. And there was a part of me that
thought I could do it, maybe one day. But then I
didn’t try. It was just a stray, existential thought
that I noted and never acted on, because I love
sketch comedy. I thought, It’s fi ne if you like Chris
more than me. It’s fi ne if you like David Cross
more than me. I like those guys more than me!’’
The best-loved sketches from ‘‘Mr. Show’’
contain only hints as to the depth of Oden-
kirk’s dramatic talent. But he reminded me of
one, ‘‘Prenatal Pageants,’’ in which he plays the
beaten-down father of an unborn child whom
he and his wife enter into a beauty contest for
fetuses. This role could be a total throwaway,
but for some reason Odenkirk decided to play
it with depth, supplying a sketch aimed at our
image-obsessed society with a palpable sadness:This is a simple, slow-witted man, who takes a
string of demeaning jobs in order to enter his
unborn child into beauty contests. ‘‘I remember
doing that and saying, ‘I’m immersing myself in
this character at a level I don’t normally do, and
it feels very true,’ ’’ Odenkirk said. Cross told me:
‘‘One of the things that made ‘Mr. Show’ stand
out is there’s pathos to a lot of those charac-
ters. I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s
a humanity to some of those characters that you
don’t really see that often in sketches.’’
Odenkirk had been thinking about that
particular performance recently, he said, in
the context of an upcoming project: a faux-
documentary series about cults, co-starring
Cross, in which the two will play gurus. ‘‘We’re
trying to go to another level with it,’’ Odenkirk
said, adding that, after the ‘‘Mr. Show’’ reboot for
Netfl ix, they decided that ‘‘we needed to move
into a new area, but one that connected to our
comedy.’’ Cross described the show as having
‘‘elements of seriousness and drama to it, not
like a ‘Law & Order’ episode, but these guys
are gonna be real human beings.’’ Playing them
would require a kind of ‘‘emoting that we might
have once been a little gun-shy about,’’ Cross
added, ‘‘but not anymore.’’
Odenkirk said his ambition was to ‘‘do our
comedy, but maybe take all that we’ve done in
the intervening years and put it to some use, of
digging into character and playing it with some
sensitivity, having some levels but also be funny.’’
If you tried to unite the various strands of Oden-
kirk’s career, you could do worse than to say that
they are by and large about ‘‘damaged men,’’ as
Cross put it to me, living in (deranged by?) an
America in decline: buff oonish authority fi gures
he lampoons with wit and venom, underdogs he
invests with a complicated, warts-and-all tender-
ness. Perhaps it’s because Odenkirk came of age in
the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but this was true
of Matt Foley on ‘‘S.N.L.,’’ true of any number of
‘‘Mr. Show’’ characters, true of Saul Goodman, true
of Jimmy McGill and true of the bruiser he plays in
‘‘Nobody’’ — a guy whom Odenkirk regards, much
like Jimmy, as a cautionary tale. (The movie was
inspired by two real-life break-ins that Odenkirk
declines to discuss in any detail.) ‘‘My hope is we
get to do a trilogy, and he ends up with nothing,’’
he said. ‘‘He destroys everything he loves.’’
We reached a vista, some 9,500 feet above
sea level, overlooking Albuquerque. ‘‘Better Call
Saul’’ would keep Odenkirk here at least until
mid- February. ‘‘I wanna stay under the radar,’’
he said, imagining what came next, ‘‘and get to
be this guy who gets to go over here and then
gets to go over there. Because some of these
things I’ve done feel opposed. They don’t live in
the same Venn diagram. But I think that’s cool.’’
Odenkirk thought about this for a second.
‘‘I like being able to get away with it,’’ he said.
‘‘And that’s something that gets harder if people
know you too well.’’