Bob Odenkirk ducks into a West Village coffee shop wearing sunglasses and a Chicago Cubs cap.
Some degree of subterfuge might have been necessary for Odenkirk years ago. Surely fans of “Mr. Show” or “The Larry Sanders Show” might have recognized him. But with time, Odenkirk has traveled from the fringes of pop culture to the mainstream. He’s well-known now, but for what is a moving target.
At 62, Odenkirk is not only a comic icon, he’s a six-time Emmy-nominated actor, for “Better Call Saul,” a Tony-nominated Broadway star, for “Glengarry Glen Ross,” and, most surprisingly, an action star.
He’s not even a newbie, either. With “Nobody 2,” the sequel to the 2021 pandemic hit original, Odenkirk’s butt-kicking bona fides are more or less established. In the sequel, which opened in theaters Thursday, he returns as Hutch Mansell, the suburban dad with latent powers of destruction. This time, he and his family go on vacation to Wisconsin Dells, where they run into trouble.
“My goal is Jackie Chan’s ‘Police Story,'” Odenkirk says, sipping an iced tea before a day of promotion obligations. “It exists to be funny. The disconnect is the lack of irony. Hutch has to mean it.”
Odenkirk’s unlikely but sincere turn into Keanu Reeves territory has, in a way, only illuminated the rage that bubbled throughout his comedy. Chatting casually but intensely, Odenkirk explained how all of these iterations of him make sense — and how “Nobody” might have even saved his life.
Q: Your friends in comedy, have they been funny about you as an action hero?
ODENKIRK: The whole time I was training I was thinking: They’re not going to make this movie, and I’m getting free exercise training. The second thing I was thinking: If they make this movie, David Cross, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler, David Spade, these people are going to see me do this thing and go, “Really?” It’s just so fundamentally discordant. I could have asked for more comedy in the first one. And I didn’t want that. I wanted to either make a real action movie — which would blow my friends’ minds — or don’t do it at all. If you’re just going to ridicule the form, don’t do it. Or just do “Naked Gun,” which is super fun, too. I thought the funnier thing — what I did — was to do it. That’s a joke on a cosmic scale. I’m literally pranking the universe. I am, right? That’s the big joke. Now, what do I do with it? That’s the question.
Q: With the “Nobody” movies and your recent Broadway experience, you’ve set a high bar for surprising people with what you’re capable of.
ODENKIRK: I thought about the character of Saul. He never quits. He gets pushed around. He’s clever. He’s in a spot and he has to think of a way out. That’s an action character. While it’s true that it feels like, “Oh, boy, you went so far away.” I didn’t really go that far away. It’s one step. It’s a big step. Everything else is in Saul. I did think that for people who know my comedy, this is going to be a hard sell. But that’s not that many people. That’s a cult group.
Q: And it might not be that hard of a sell to your comedy fans, either. The lie detector “Mr. Show” sketch, in which you calmly confess to outlandish things, has a similar what’s-under-the-surface quality like the “Nobody” movies.
ODENKIRK: (Laughs) Yeah, yes.
Q: Maybe the most relevant sketch, though, is the one where you and David Cross playtough guys who bump into each other in a bar and then remained locked in mutual animosity through their lives, even through marriage. “Nobody 2” kicks off with a similar encounter.
ODENKIRK: It’s a tap on the shoulder that sets this whole thing off. He agrees to leave. Then this little tap happens. Then he leaves. He’s outside. He can keep walking, which is what you would do. You’d get home and tell your wife, “That guy tapped her on the back of the head.” It would just sit with you forever. The whole thing could have been avoided if it wasn’t for who Hutch is, which is a person who allows himself to go crazy.
Q: Allowing yourself to go crazy isn’t a radically different impulse in comedy. Did you always feel like rage or anger was fueling some of the funniest things you did?
ODENKIRK: For sure. I remember sitting with David Cross in the morning. We would start our time at “Mr. Show” trying to generate ideas, sitting around with the paper. Oftentimes, it was: “This really pisses me off,” or “Look at this stupid thing.” So, yeah, frustration, anger, those are the very raw materials of comedy.
Q: You’re just funneling that rage into a different place.
ODENKIRK: Life conjures up this rage in you, but there is no place that deserves it. In the first film, the first place he goes to exact revenge, he realizes all these people have nothing, they don’t deserve it. In the second film, he goes after this guy and he’s like, “I’m under her thumb.” It’s really not something you’re supposed to do in an action movie, and I love that. You don’t just get to find a bad guy around the corner. You’ve got to go looking.
Q: You’ve said you’d like to do a third one that ends with Hutch having nothing.
ODENKIRK: Yeah, the moral would be that everything he loves is gone. He burned everything he loved. We let him get away with it because the movie is an entertainment and it’s meant to tell you: Yes, you can let go of your rage in this magical world. But in the end, I would think that it’s an addiction. And he does want to do it. He does want to have a go, and so does every guy. That’s why we have movies. And that’s why we have boxing matches.
Q: How much credit do you give these movies for saving your life? After you had a heart attack in 2021 on the set of “Better Call Saul,” you attributed your narrow survival to your “Nobody” training.
ODENKIRK: When I had my EKG, where you can see the heart, the doctor explained that I had almost no scarring from that incident. And that’s kind of weird because of how long that incident went on and how drastic it was. They were like: “This should all be scar tissue, and there’s none.” They said that’s because these other veins are bigger than we’re used to seeing, and that’s from all the exercise you’ve been doing. And, dude, I did a lot. I went from a comedy writer who exercised just by riding a bike three or four times a week to the action I did in those movies.
Q: You told Marc Maron you saw no white light and tongue-in-cheek advised him to “go for the money.”
ODENKIRK: Well, I got nothing. Nothing. I did talk to my family the next day. I woke up the next day around 1:30 and talked to my wife and kids. I was talking to people for the next week, and I don’t remember any of it, or the day that it happened.
Q: But did the experience change you?
ODENKIRK: (Long pause) It’s a big component of my thinking about who I am and what I want to do with myself and my time. The thing that’s driven me the most in my life is a sense of responsibility. Not just like, “Oh, I have kids. I have to make money and take care of them.” But, like, responsibility to the universe. “Oh, they’ll let you do this action movie.” Well, then you better do a f—— great job. “They want you do ‘Better Call Saul.'” Well, let’s go. The universe is saying: You can do this. And you owe that opportunity that’s so unjustified and magical. I just feel responsibility almost too readily. But the heart attack, however you want to feel about everybody’s expectations of you, I mean, you’re going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without you, just fine. So I don’t know, man. Yeah, you’ve got to come through for people. But you’ve also got a lot of freedom to invite who you want to be.
