Bob Odenkirk Says He Does Not Miss Saul Goodman at All
bob odenkirk says he does not miss Saul Goodman at all, even as the role remains one of the defining credits on his resume. At 63, he is promoting Normal, a Ben Wheatley action film that keeps him in the kind of physically demanding lane he entered with 2019’s Nobody.
Saul Goodman and Normal
“I don’t miss him at all. Not at all,” Odenkirk said in a Radio Times interview about Saul Goodman, the character he played across Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. That blunt answer cuts against the easy nostalgia pitch that usually surrounds a role of that size, and it comes while he is fronting a new film built around a different kind of threat: Ulysses Richardson, an interim sheriff policing crooked inhabitants of a small town.
“It’s very funny to me. It’s a prank that I’m playing on the universe, for anybody who bothers to notice,” he said about his late-career move into action roles. The line fits a career turn that began to register in 2019 with Nobody, then kept going with Normal, where the physicality is part of the job rather than a one-off experiment.
63 and still training
“I’m in really great shape,” Odenkirk said, and he backed it up with a routine built around staying “limber and flexible” for action scenes. He said he works out every day and can get a lot done in 25 minutes, a practical answer from someone who now has to prepare like an action lead rather than a sitcom lifer.
That shift sits alongside a sharper self-assessment of the old role. Odenkirk said Saul Goodman is “very much an action character except he does not fight,” which is a neat way of separating the writing-driven energy of the character from the physical work he is doing now. He also said, “the writing is the star” in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, putting the credit where he says it belongs instead of pretending the performance carried the whole machine alone.
Naperville to Carbondale
Naperville had about 20,000 people when Odenkirk moved there, and about 150,000 by the time of the interview, a small sign of how much his own life has stretched across the same period. He also pointed out that he went to college in Carbondale, 350 miles south of Chicago, a useful reminder that the current action stretch is not some sudden reinvention but the latest turn in a long, messy career.
“I’ve only got hurt in things that weren’t action-based,” he said after recalling that he tore up his knee during Better Call Saul while being chased by three teenagers in a nighttime scene. For viewers tracking where he goes from here, that is the practical takeaway: Odenkirk is not trying to return to Saul, and he is still willing to keep taking on parts that ask for bruises as much as dialogue.
