Bob Odenkirk, star of the acclaimed series Better Call Saul, which begins its final season this week. Photo: Getty Images
Bob Odenkirk is going to make some changes. Big changes. Hard changes. The sort of difficult and taxing personal changes that you only make when circumstances force you to. In Odenkirk's case, it's not life that forced his hand, it's near-death.
Specifically, his own.
Last July while filming a scene for the final season of his critically acclaimed series Better Call Saul, he suddenly collapsed. He was having a heart attack. He's since called this event "lucky"; lucky he was on set surrounded by people and the studio's medical staff who leaped into action and administered CPR, lucky he wasn't alone in his trailer and extremely lucky he wasn't out filming on a location such as the sizzling hot desert of the To'hajiilee Indian Reservation, which sits about two hours drive outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the show's filmed and acts as the business location of choice for its fictional drug cartels.
He spent two months recovering, returning to set in September, and for the past month he's been on the press circuit building hype for Saul's return after a two-year gap from our screens. During interviews he's been asked about the heart attack, obviously, and has answered that it showed him that he needed to make some changes and learn to be more present with the people in his life and within the moment.
It's a good answer, an honest answer, and one that satisfactorily closes the topic in an accepted and expected fashion and allows the interviewer to move on.
But while the answer is good, honest and satisfactory, what does it really mean? After being so harshly and suddenly confronted with their own mortality people often say they realised things needed to change. But what does that actually look like? It's one thing to say you're going to be more present but how do you be more present? After all, we're talking about a complete and total reconfiguration of your life's philosophy.
"I'm working really hard on it. It's not easy. I don't think fundamental change in who you are is easy," Odenkirk says. "If you find it easy then you're probably not actually doing it. I haven't done a great job yet, but I focus on it every day."
As part of his process, he began keeping a journal again, something he'd avoided doing for a long, long time. He also starts each day with an intention.
"It of course falls away almost immediately. But at least it's there," he jokes. "At least there's one moment in the morning when I go, 'What do I want to make this day about? What do I want to try to get better at or emphasise as I go through this day?'
"The real way for me to act out the lessons of this heart attack experience would be to really stop working for a couple of months and I haven't done that. Or even close to that," he admits. "That would be the hardest thing to do - it'd be very hard - to really go, 'You're not gonna work for a month. Maybe you're not gonna have a phone. You're just gonna turn everything all the way down.' It'd be extremely hard.
"I'm thinking a lot about how I can enact the lessons and the impact of that heart attack but I haven't done it entirely yet."
Much like his character Jimmy McGill, Odenkirk has a likeable sincerity that you can't help but warm to. But similar to McGill's alter-ego the slippery, huckster lawyer Saul Goodman, there's some real bite lurking beneath his affable surface. So when it's suggested that he's saying he's a work in progress he agrees, before puncturing his chill vibe with some real talk.
"Very much a work in progress. But it's also very much something I intend to do and I intend to make it hard," he says, before the unmistakably disdainful edge of Goodman slips into his voice. "Listen, if all you're saying is, 'I'm gonna enjoy life more. I'm gonna go out for drinks every night.' That's like … that's not a lesson. You didn't learn anything."
It's clear he's enjoying getting into the nitty-gritty and clearly has more he wants to say. He picks up his laptop and slides over to a nearby couch. Once comfy he continues.
"It's about really challenging yourself to slow down and listen. I can afford to do that now. But it also will be hard. It won't be fun. It won't be easy. It won't be like, 'Oh, all the bad bits are here, right on the surface' 'It'll be challenging. But I've done it before."
As evidence, he cites his unexpected lead turn in last year's hit action thriller Nobody. Written and produced by the same team behind Keanu Reeves' blockbuster John Wick franchise, it was a role that required the comedy star to hit the gym for three to four hours a day for 18 months to get in the physical shape the movie required. A sequel is now in development.
"Training hard was something I never did in my life. I wanted to push myself and I did it. So I can do a hard thing and I think this is gonna be a hard thing. To really employ the lessons of that experience; that I've got to slow down and appreciate what I have. The heart attack left me thinking not that I have to change any one thing in my life but that I have to value everything that I already have more."
You can spend a lifetime climbing to the top - and the 59-year-old actor has got closer than most with two Emmys, a New York Times bestselling memoir titled Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, and lead roles in two of television's all-time greats, Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul - before realising you can never really get there. There's always a next thing and a next thing and a next thing ...
"That's the wonderful lesson of success," he laughs. "If you're lucky enough to have success in your career, in your life, a degree of success that you dreamed about or maybe even better than you dreamed about, then you're left looking and going, 'Oh, wait a second, I'm still unsatisfied. I'm still not okay with myself.' Then that makes you go, 'I always thought success was gonna give me that,' and of course, it isn't."
He pauses, then emphasises the message. "Of course it isn't.
"It sounds like I'm saying I"m gonna retire and sit around, I don't know, going to dinner with my family or something. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about indulging yourself. I'm talking about slowing your experience down and forcing your ass to sit in the chair and take in what's around you and not just running to the next responsibility or building more and more goals that you have to fulfil."
Struck by a thought he smiles and says, "Sounds a bit monk-ish." Then he shrugs and says, "I guess it is."
Nine months on from the heart attack, Odenkirk's all good, man. He's healthy and excited for Better Call Saul's final season, which starts on Neon and SkyGo on Tuesday night. As the final chapter to the story he's been telling for around 12 years is now here, its conclusion feels bittersweet.
"It's been a long trip," he jokes. "I'm gonna miss him. There's no question. This is the best part anybody could have. The dynamics of it are insane. I don't know any actor who's ever been given that much range to play within a character. I'll never see another character like this. And that's okay. I'll regret it. I'll feel bad. I'll wish I had it. But you just don't get 'em and they just don't write 'em. It's hard to write 'em. I just got extremely lucky."
With its multi-layered storytelling, full of moral complexities, dire situations and quirky comedy coupled with its confident, whip-smart clever creativity and an unrivalled dedication to letting its slow-burning fuse inch close to detonating over six seasons before getting close to exploding Better Call Saul is artistically and creatively ambitious on a scale that other shows just aren't. Yes, there are plenty of great new shows, Yellowjackets and Severance to name just two similarly premium hits from this year, yet it's disappointing that no shows are trying to match its inventive ambition.
"I have a theory," Odenkirk says. "I don't think Saul would have worked if Breaking Bad wasn't the phenomenon that it was. That sounds self-evident, but what I mean is that because Breaking Bad was so strong, powerful, energetic, and gripping it taught you how to watch. It taught you, the audience, to watch for details that would later matter a lot. You start to realise, 'This is really quiet right now but I gotta watch because something's happening and I'm gonna miss it if I don't pay attention,' and then you were rewarded for paying that kind of attention. I feel that if somebody else started a show like Better Call Saul without coming out of a big show it would die. People would be like, 'This is too slow, this is too quiet.'"
Then with a knowing grin, he says, "It wouldn't last."
1. Shady, fast-talking lawyer Saul Goodman first appeared in the second season of the acclaimed crime drama Breaking Bad as comic relief to the show's increasingly grim, violent world.
2. Originally intended to appear in just three episodes, Odenkirk's happy-go-lucky portrayal quickly saw the minor character become a favourite of fans and the series creator Vince Gilligan and its story editor Peter Gould. Subsequently, Goodman's narrative importance grew exponentially with each season.
3. Once Breaking Bad concluded, Gilligan and Gould decided to write a prequel series exploring the origins of the shamelessly slick lawyer. Written as a tragicomedy character study Better Call Saul charts how circumstance transformed the good-natured Jimmy McGill into the slimy criminal lawyer Saul Goodman.
4. Before Breaking Bad, Odenkirk was known primarily as a comic actor. He wrote for American comedy institution Saturday Night Live, created the cult favourite sketch series Mr Show with fellow comedian David Cross, and had roles on shows The Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Breaking Bad was his first dramatic role.
5. Better Call Saul has been praised for the inventiveness and creativity of its cinematography, its unrivalled use of music and the ambition of its storytelling. A favourite example of how every aspect of its production reinforces its story appears in the season three episode Fall. A montage set to an upbeat and happy mariachi tune shows Goodman moving all the pieces and watching the blocks fall into place of his "elder law" scam; you see him helping out old people, calling their Bingo numbers, signing them up, and then grinning as his riches grow. The music, which will most likely have a nagging familiarity, is called Korobeiniki, aka the Tetris theme tune.
6. In a 2018 interview for the NZ Herald's entertainment magazine TimeOut, Gilligan was asked about putting in those sorts of sneaky details. He replied, "That's some of the most fun we have."
Old Saint Nick is no stranger to the big screen.