Bob Odenkirk Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

for a while there it seemed like everyone wanted me to play an agent a network executive a lawyer i'm not a duplicitous person i am not running a con on anyone but for some reason people felt i was able to inhabit those roles well which is uh perfectly fine with me it's all pretend [Music] i just got a phone call from my agent and he said there's a show called breaking bad they're going to invite you to do a part you've got to say yes to this one this is the kind of part people win emmys for well i haven't won an emmy yet but i've come close so my agent was pretty on the nose there he he knew what he was talking about anyway i'd never seen breaking bad it was in its second season and it was not doing well in the ratings didn't really do well until the third and fourth seasons i called a friend as soon as my agent hung up and i said have you ever heard of this show breaking bad and he said it's the best show on tv you have to say yes to that whatever they ask you to do say yes so vince calls and he goes there's a character he's named saul goodman he's got he's a lawyer he's a sleazy lawyer you see these guys on the back of buses they have the little advertisement on the back of the bus i said i know we barely know each other i've not read anything but i have an idea for his hair i said can he have a comb over and a mullet and then clean on the sides and vince goes yeah i think that'd work that sounds pretty good what you two need is an honest-to-god businessman right somebody who treats your product like the simple high margin commodity that it is somebody who ships out of town deals only in bulk someone who's been doing this for 20 years and never been caught the look of saul is a big part of how i play them and where i draw the energy from i've always gotten a lot from hair and facial hair and costume as far as informing and telling me who this person is and how they how they walk and sit and stand and talk you know the part was written by peter gould who then carried on to crete better call saul with vince gilligan and who now runs that show for the last few years those guys just were really having fun and in fact they gave me the part not because of larry sanders which is what i thought they gave me the part because of mr show so give them tons of credit for foresight [Music] it's uh the biggest best role i probably ever have in my life they don't there's there's almost no role you can point to that has as much humor comedy pure comedy in a scene and then two scenes later drama directness simplicity and earnestness all those things right near each other and all of them tied together and grounded i've never done anything to deserve the range of that role there's great actors and people training at juilliard right now who will never get a role that good in their lives so i treasure it and i want to make the most of it and i don't know how it ends i kind of hope that the character of jimmy mcgill finds some way to be at peace with the world and feel uh valued and loved but i have a feeling that's not what's gonna happen you know what um i think tomorrow i might uh call that shrink couldn't hurt right we didn't have to torture ourselves to invent jimmy because saul goodman in breaking bad you only ever see him at work so because of that there's nothing established about his personal life and there was nothing that had to be understood or explained he's very much a facade that gave vince gilligan and peter gould and all the other writers a great degree of freedom to invent jimmy mcgill and we all agreed that the first thing they needed to do was make him likable someone that you would root for because as fun as saul goodman was in breaking bad he was only fun and funny in relation to a group of people who all had guns to their heads and were torturing each other and the two of you agreed that since as everybody knows you're going back to work any day now that the firm should help you make ends meet that's correct minus the sarcasm hamlet's making you a jump i'm going to get better they really did a beautiful thing in inventing jimmy mcgill and giving him that back story and his brother who he's caring for played by michael mckean and ray seahorn playing kim wexler someone he loves they really built someone that you could uh you could like [Music] mr show was my dream come true i met robert smeigle and through robert and working with him i got hired at saturday night live and worked there for a couple years and i went to la and i was doing my own thing and i got hired at the ben stiller show which was a wonderful place to work and we had so much fun but it was very short-lived and then i met david cross for the second or third or fifth time i didn't really talk to him the first couple times i met him and i realized we were on the same wavelength comedically and we started writing together and we clicked immediately we did sketches here in town and started pitching a show that would be like monty python in that one sketch would sort of transform into the next sketch and we would be political but not on the nose not topical but we would be socially political and aware and very very silly and hopefully a little bit smart and hopefully very very funny i wrote it down in case you wanted it why would i want that old thing when i can have this [Music] and that was mr show and hbo picked it up and we did it for four years we did 33 episodes uh they're jam-packed with jokes and laughs and funny characters and ideas just it's my brain on screen so if you want to know what it's like inside this mad house you go watch mr show don't worry mother the wind [Laughter] you did it twice three times you weren't here i thought i have this kind of intensity inside me that i've occasionally showed and occasionally for comedy sake in mr show people loved when i would scream god damn it god damn it god damn it greg god damn it get out of there and we often used it for laughs i uh asked around to the powers that be in hollywood and people kind of liked the idea they thought there was something to it a kind of more of an everyman action hero somebody who looks really not like he's gonna kick your ass [Music] i'm playing this character hutch mansell who's a father a dad and has a real nothing job he's hidden away he's purposefully hidden himself away some incidents happen that bring out the beast inside him and i get to rage full-on in action hero mode do some amazing screen fighting which i trained for two years for and i'm very proud to say i did all my own fighting and i loved it my favorite thing to shoot in nobody was the bus fight it was an opportunity for me to show what i'd learned of training for two years i got out a lot of rage i got to laugh a lot it was very inventive physical fighting there was all these people involved and we had to work together to shoot it was a group effort greg ramenter uh was the director on that sequence ilya nyschuler directed the movie and my good friend daniel bernhardt who trained me for two damn years of patience and fortitude was in it as well and so i got to make that fight sequence with my friends and make a fight sequence that i'm really proud of larry called me and asked me to play a a porn and ex-porn star he told me there's gonna be a dinner party at your house and you're gonna tell a really crude story from your porn days and you need to write two porn stories that are really inappropriate you guys looking around it's a great house great place my wife jokingly refers to it as the house that built because of my porn i never made enough money to buy it i told her he wrote the line when i welcome him to my house that's larry david so much fun to improvise comedy that way in a kind of a subtle and you know realist kind of vibe a great experience to do curvier enthusiasm and i've always wanted to do more like it and there aren't many shows that shoot that way but it's usually a small personal idiosyncrasy that you're told to lead the way and then you just everything else is a riff [Music] i was a writer and performer on the ben stiller show which was a sketch show on fox tv that ran for 12 beautiful episodes gary was a guest on our show we all had a good time talking to him but then he had his show and he needed someone to play his agent he clearly wanted a young person and gary did this very nice thing of calling me aside and talking to me about the role and uh i got it i signed barry levinson last week just came by to hold his hand say listen if you guys need any help booking guests just pick up the phone is a fast talking agent not unlike saul goodman uh certainly the one we met in breaking bad but this was years before that and it was based on my agent at the time ari emanuel very famous agent who later was also built into a character on entourage played by jeremy piven i think jeremy probably nailed him a little better than i did but i just was using this kind of energy that i got from my friend ari emanuel or he's a very energetic guy to the point where he is almost so carried away with his ideas that he'll phone you and then he won't listen to you because he's already moved on it's kind of rude but i never minded it i just liked him i liked his energy for a while there it seemed like everyone wanted me to play an agent a network executive a lawyer i'm not a duplicitous person i i'm not running a con on anyone but for some reason people felt i was able to inhabit those roles well which is uh perfectly fine with me it's all pretend so larry are we uh on yeah yeah boom you're number one yeah i love working with gary shandling he was the mastermind of that show it was a unique show i'd never seen comedy that was as dry and subtle as what gary pulled off on the larry sanders show i loved him i'm so proud to be a part of it working with bruce stern was a treasured memory for me maybe we'll get to work together again he's so great and of course i love will forte because he's a sweetheart at one point i had to read a news report it was just dry factual nothingness and i literally couldn't make it through this stupid simple thing so i said to alexander i said can i just do a comedy version of this just one time just roll the cameras and i'm just gonna make fun of every one of these stories and he said sure i went through and every story i just made fun of i made i made a joke about and i got that out of me and then i was able to be a real actor the council is expected to debate the proposal in monday's session coming up next in sports carter brings us the story of a hardened snowmobiler who may have lost his legs but not his will to compete i was just offered that role on seinfeld and it was a great experience you know seinfeld worked like a laugh machine and not in a bad way not in a cold and unfeeling and mechanical way but in a reliable and professional way so i went in acted it didn't have to exaggerate the person just played him earnestly it was a great great experience you know i'm not really a doctor oh i'm not really attracted to you well i'm seriously and i went to medical school but i still have to pass my licensing exam they were such a team on the same page working together so well uh that you just tried to catch up and and just say your lines at the right time and everything would be okay i did not watch seinfeld until after it was long over my girlfriend at the time was a huge fan so i certainly knew that it was great but the last time i'd really seen larry david was at the improv in new york when i was a writer for saturday night live and he was totally out of work i'm not sure if he was penniless but just it's fun to imagine a penniless larry david he complained even more than he does now that he's a billionaire now that i've watched every single episode it is in my top three sitcoms of all time

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Id: Y_pzHcDDkE0

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021