Bob Odenkirk: ‘I’m good enough to do my own stunts at 63’

Age is just a number, they say. Just ask Bob Odenkirk. At 63, the American star is enjoying something of a late-career switch to action star.

After playing slimy lawyer Saul Goodman in TV series Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, he played a family man fighting the Russian mafia in 2021 film Nobody and last year’s sequel, Nobody 2. Now he’s an interim sheriff facing off with some corrupt townsfolk in new movie, Normal.

Like Liam Neeson before him, Bob’s getting in on the geri-action gigs. It’s 10am when we speak and he’s itching to get down the gym. In the afternoon, he’s off to work out with his trainer, Daniel Bernhardt.

‘It engages your brain,’ he says. From boxing to choreography, he and Daniel spar like demons. ‘It’s just more fun than a workout that a person would do on their own.’

Bob ‘reluctantly’ took up going to the gym in his 30s. But it was only in his early 50s, when he and writer Derek Kolstad started developing Nobody, that he learned how to stunt fight. ‘Now I’m good enough to do all the basics on my own,’ he says.

I ask Bob whether his example might lead to others of his age doing the same and taking up fitness in their later years. ‘I hope so. I would like to inspire people.

‘There’s an advantage I feel that I have in not having used my body. My knees are in decent shape. My hips are in good shape. My back is good. It’s not great, but it’s good.’

Bob was drawn to the script for Normal, not because it was filled with bone-crunching action – which it is – but because of the mysterious first act, as his character Ulysses discovers that just about everyone in the film’s Midwest town of Normal is crooked.

‘I’m just all about the first act,’ he shrugs. ‘Is there a story, a guy that we can relate to? And certain kind of tensions? Things that when we feel them, we go, “I know what that feels like.”’ Raised in Naperville, Illinois, the second eldest of seven siblings, Bob knows something of what it’s like to live in a town like the one in the film.

‘It certainly felt like I was in the middle of nowhere as a kid,’ he says. ‘And as a teenager I couldn’t wait to get out. But the town I grew up in was a quaint, very nice Midwestern town. If I had an issue with it, it was that it was too sedate and too placid.’

In three days, Bob is heading to the real Normal – the small Illinois college town that lent its name to the movie. ‘I’m going to show this movie to a bunch of people,’ he says, presumably hoping they won’t be too offended that he and Derek Kolstad depicted a town on the wane.

‘The movie was not called “Normal”,’ he says. ‘It was called “The Interim” because my character is an interim sheriff. He’s filling in. And I said, “Could you name it after the town?”’

With Ben Wheatley, British cult director of horror crime film Kill List (2011) at the helm, Bob looks like he could give prime-era Arnie Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone a run for their money when it comes to action.

‘You get a lot of protection when you’re doing film,’ he says. ‘The stunt team make you look good. So I think anybody who’s being honest with you about doing action knows that the team of people who are taking the hits are making it look just as good as the person delivering.’

What’s intriguing about Bob’s unexpected switch to action star is that he started out as a comedy writer, working on shows such as Saturday Night Live and The Ben Stiller Show.

Performing sketch comedy is a world away from movie fighting. ‘In comedy, it’s fun to smile,’ he says. ‘The character comes out, you know who they are and you want to hug them. You know them, completely, from sight. There’s no ulterior thing going on at all. That works great in comedy.’

Then came Breaking Bad and its equally brilliant spin-off Better Call Saul. ‘Actors dream of parts that are as good as the parts in both of those series. Almost every character gets justification, gets dimension.’

He points to a ‘wonderful’ episode in the latter when the evil Gus Fring’s personal life is shown. ‘I mean, that kind of writing, that kind of world-building with sensitivity and humanity, is just… thank God people liked it so that we got to do it.’

The two shows turned Bob into a major star, with Better Call Saul netting him six Emmy nominations across its seasons. The role of Saul was once-in-a-lifetime. ‘I just went at it with complete earnestness and seriousness of purpose, without any protection of apology or ironic dimension that would protect me.’

Now Bob is developing a comedy with his son Nate, inspired by classic British sitcom The Royle Family, which starred Ricky Tomlinson as a sofa-dwelling, TV-watching curmudgeon.

‘It’s quite different but again, the DNA of people just sitting around is there,’ says Bob, who also has a daughter, Erin, with his talent manager/producer wife Naomi Yomtov.

From action star to couch potato? Not on your life. Bob has no plans to ditch his gym routine. ‘I have to keep it up,’ he grins.

Normal is in cinemas now.

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