WHEN BETTER CALL SAUL’S BOB ODENKIRK HAD A HEART ATTACK LAST YEAR, THE WORLD FROZE, WAITING FOR GOOD NEWS. IN AN EXTRAORDINARY INTERVIEW, THE COMEDIAN-TURNED-ACTION STAR TALKS RESURRECTION AND REINVENTION

WORDS CHRIS HEWITT

Bob Odenkirk, photographed exclusively for Empire in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 24 January 2022.

PORTRAITS DYLAN COULTER

BOB ODENKIRK MISSED ALL THE DRAMA.

He missed that period last July when, for a couple of days, he became the absolute focus of a heartfelt wave of support across any social-media platform you could name. He missed all of that because he had suffered a heart attack while filming the final season of Better Call Saul, and was very much out of it, fighting for his life. For a while there, things looked pretty sketchy.

Odenkirk is now fully recovered, and looks great. He turns 60 this year, and is talking to Empire from his home in Albuquerque — Better Call Saul is filmed in and around the town. He holds up his wrist, where the surgeons opened him up (to get to the radial artery, which accesses the heart), to the camera he’s using to chat to us. “You can’t even see it,” he says of the scar. “I don’t remember being in the hospital. And I was in the hospital for a week. I don’t have any memories of it.”

But he’s since been made aware of that outpouring of love on social-media, with millions of people united for a brief shining moment in willing him to pull through.“That really knocked me out,” he says.“The reaction of goodwill, and concern from strangers, just fucking blew my mind. And still does.”

In many ways, it sums up the impact Odenkirk has had over a career that now spans close to 40 years; a career he tries to take stock of in his new memoir (written pre-heart attack), called Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama. A title that neatly encapsulates the divide of that career. The first three-quarters were entirely devoted to comedy, either as a writer on Saturday Night Live, or a writer-performer-co-creator on the seminal sketch show Mr. Show. He helped Tenacious D and Tim & Eric take their first faltering steps, he’s directed the comedy films Let’s Go To Prison and The Brothers Solomon, and collaborated with Larry David, Mike Myers, Janeane Garofalo, Garry Shandling, Will Forte and Judd Apatow.

Then, in 2009, the comedy comedy comedy took a sudden sharp turn into drama, when he was asked to come aboard Vince Gilligan’s crime series Breaking Bad as fast-talking crooked lawyer Saul Goodman (say it out loud). He made such an impact that when it wrapped up its run, Odenkirk became, in 2015, the anchor of his own prequel, Better Call Saul, in which we meet Jimmy McGill, the flawed and fallible man behind the brash exterior. Since then, Odenkirk has worked with Steven Spielberg, Greta Gerwig and Alexander Payne, and ploughed all that dramatic currency into his own action-hero turn in last year’s riotous action-thriller Nobody. So, over the years, Bob Odenkirk has made a lot of stuff that means an awful lot to a lot of people. It may not have always been plain sailing, but now? Now it’s all good, man.