'Why do people love me? I'm bad thing a person can be'

Louis Chilton, The Independent

I'm very earthbound," says Bob Odenkirk, looking, for want of a better word, entirely normal. Gone are the garish off-the-rack suits he paraded as Breaking Bad's unscrupulous shyster Saul Goodman; in their stead is a muted greyish sweater, as he perches on the edge of a chair in a Soho hotel room. "I'm a dad, I'm a husband, and I'm a guy who walks his dog a couple times a day. A guy who clumsily tries to make things. But within the qualifier of 'normal', there's a pretty wide range of human behaviour," he adds. "Which is to say... everybody should have a few aberrations."

Here's one aberration that marks Odenkirk out from the crowd: yelling. From his early days on HBO's cult sketch comedy Mr Show, through to the life-and-death hijinks of Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, the 63-year-old has proved himself to be one of the best and funniest yellers on planet earth. There are entire compilations on YouTube simply of Bob Odenkirk yelling — everything from a slick, sleazy fury to a sort of emasculated, pyrrhic bellow. Today, unsurprisingly, there's none of that. His Illinois lilt is muffled and a little scratchy, if anything.

Just what "normal" means is a pertinent question for Odenkirk, Normal being the name of his latest film. In a similar vein to 2021's Nobody and its sequel — gritty, John Wickian action thrillers that incongruously cast Odenkirk as a grizzled man of violence — Normal sees him play a docile lawman who is sent to a backwater American town after the death of its old sheriff. Normal is both the name of the town, and, it seems, a description of it. Before long, however, things all get a bit Hot Fuzz.

At the start of our interview, he asks if I watched Normal in a cinema. I tell him I watched it online, via a screener. He exclaims, “It’s really fun with an audience. All those orchestrated moments of violence, when things start popping off. I'm going to watch it with an audience again tonight — it's my 11th time."

Directed by Ben Wheatley (Sightseers; Meg 2: The Trench), Normal is a slight tonal departure from Nobody. It's funnier and dafter — "wearing a smirk from beginning to end", Odenkirk says. "Have you ever seen the film Final Destination? There are some kills in Normal that Ben referred to as 'Final Destination kills'."

It's not entirely new territory for Odenkirk: mustachioed and uniform-clad, he looks much as he did in the first season of Fargo in 2014. But it's strange seeing him play someone so unassuming. Historically, Odenkirk gravitated towards the brash and the sharklike. When he was coming up in the Nineties — as an amoral, cocaine-snorting agent on The Larry Sanders Show, or as any number of one-off parts on Mr Show (the series he co-created with David Cross, which included Sarah Silverman and Jack Black among its players) — many of his characters had what he describes as a "duplicitous, insensitive" quality. Or to put it another way: "Quite a few of my characters have been pricks."

There is, he admits, "a forcefulness of personality to them that I probably have myself. I don't think I'm ever as inconsiderate or insensitive as they are, but it's not something completely foreign to me."

It's odd, though, I suggest, that Odenkirk's public image seems so removed from most of his characters. He is a man who attracts an enormous amount of goodwill, and is about as universally liked as they come (if social media is anything to go by). Often, you hear about actors bearing the brunt of their characters' transgressions: Mad Men's January Jones was berated in the street after Betty Draper cheated on her husband; Ghostbusters hard-arse William Atherton said he couldn't walk into a bar without people trying to fight him. Yet when it comes to Odenkirk, nothing seems to stick.

"Dude, if you can figure it out, tell me," he says. "I don't know. I'm very thankful that people feel warmly towards me — but I agree with you."

Then again, there's always been a dormant humanity to him, even in his most obnoxious creations. Perhaps it was 2019's Little Women that tipped the scales of public opinion — Greta Gerwig picking up on Odenkirk's innate geniality to cast him, somewhat against type, as the benevolent Father March. ("My little women," he coos, memorably, when he returns from war unsavaged.) Or indeed, Better Call Saul (2015 to 2022), which took Saul Goodman — a superlative caricature of a low-rent legal huckster — and reimagined him as Jimmy McGill, a tragicomic figure with astounding dimensionality.

It was early on in Saul, in a dramatic scene where Jimmy confronts his brother (played by Michael McKean) for impeding his legal career, when Odenkirk first realised just how much he had been given to work with. "It wasn't just emotion, just wanting to cry on TV — because I don't," he says. "But the level of earnest self-revelation that goes on... it's just wild. I never deserved to get that kind of part. I did nothing to earn that."