Bob Odenkirk on Better Call Saul's final chapter and Breaking Bad reunion joy

“I’ve been doing it for so long and it’s such a part of my life that I don’t think I’ve fully accepted that it’s over,” admits Odenkirk, speaking on Zoom while on his morning dog-walk around his Los Angeles neighbourhood. “It’s been 12 years of my life. But when I finish watching this season with everyone else, that’s when it’ll hit me: that’s done.”

Things were nearly done for Odenkirk last year, too. While shooting this final season of Better Call Saul last summer, the actor suffered a heart attack during filming for the eighth episode. He has no memory of the immediate aftermath of his collapse, but he knows it was 5:30pm, the cast and crew had been shooting all day and that they were changing shots. So the Illinois-born actor, now 59, headed to the exercise bike he used between scenes and began watching a Chicago Cubs baseball game on TV.

“I went down on one knee, and then I went all the way down. I guess I said, ‘I don’t feel very good,’” he recalls with a rueful laugh. Odenkirk now knows that castmates Rhea Seehorn [who plays Kim Wexler] and Patrick Fabian [Howard Hamlin] grabbed his head and hand and “started yelling at me to stay on Earth”.

Luckily the show’s health officer had a defibrillator in the boot of her car and, while she ran to get it, trained crew administered CPR – “proper CPR”, as he puts it. “I wasn’t breathing. I mean, if nobody had been there, if they didn’t do that CPR, I’d have been dead in a few minutes.” Three shots of the defibrillator were followed by emergency surgery that cleaned out the artery he gamely dubs “the widowmaker”.

But blocked blood vessels notwithstanding, Odenkirk was already in great shape after shooting last year’s well-reviewed action film Nobody. “Now I take a bunch of heart medication I didn’t take before!” he says cheerfully, before adding that he is maintaining the same workout regime. “Otherwise, what’s changed is, you get that real sense that there’s a limit to this life. So the choices you make with what you do next, and what you commit to, that’s where it affects you. You try to get your [professional] priorities to be ones that you’ll feel good about if you go down!”

Fans have followed the on-screen antics of Saul Goodman for over a decade, with the slippery bagman for Mexican drug cartels arriving in season 2 of Breaking Bad. Odenkirk’s get-out-of-jail fixer became entangled with the spiralling (mis)fortunes of high school chemistry teacher-turned-methamphetamine kingpin Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his hapless sidekick Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).

But as beautifully unfurled in Better Call Saul’s origins story, the character started out as lovable conman Jimmy McGill. He’s a man who changes track – and also his name to something altogether slicker (Saul Goodman = “it’s all good, man”). This is partly in response to forces conspiring against him, including a fusty New Mexico legal firm that won’t give him a break.

Saul’s still fundamentally decent, though. And he’s a devoted husband to fellow lawyer Kim Wexler, played by Seehorn. Last month the actress was finally honoured with a first Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actress.

By contrast, Odenkirk has been nominated in the lead actor category for every one of the five full seasons that have aired so far.

But as we’ve seen over the first half of this final season, Saul’s fast-and-loose approach to legal procedure has caught up with him: he and Kim’s actions have resulted in people being killed by the ruthless “narcos”.

“We’ve been waiting for these two storylines to come together, the bad guys’ and Kim and Jimmy’s relationship – and now they have done in the worst possible way. From here on out, we watch them dealing with the consequences of their choices,” Odenkirk says.

Given that Kim wasn’t in Breaking Bad, it’s clear that something wicked this way comes. For the faithful, though, that sense of dread has been mitigated by the appearance of Cranston and Paul’s characters in this final lap.

With his dog barking excitedly in the background, Odenkirk smiles and says it was “the greatest joy ever” to reunite with the old gang. “The first episode I did on Breaking Bad was a big scene with those guys in the desert, at 2am, in a sandstorm. So to revisit the relationship now... I can’t say more than that. Because it’s a mindblower, man!”

Read more: Breaking Bad creator responds to Better Call Saul spin-off rumours: "Time to do something new"

Prior to Breaking Bad, Odenkirk was best known in the US as a comedian and sketch comedy writer/actor; in the UK, he was barely known at all. Now he’s renowned worldwide.

“I’m a whole lot more famous than I need to be,” he says. “It’s OK, I can deal with that, but it has been a massive alteration in how I live in the world – and certainly has been for my kids,” he says of his son and daughter, both now in their early 20s. “They get excited by it. Then they also get tired of it.”

On top of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Odenkirk has had roles in How I Met Your Mother, Fargo, The Simpsons and the critically-acclaimed films Nebraska, The Post and Little Women. His latest project is the recently announced series Straight Man.

In the comedy drama based on a comic novel, he plays a small-town East Coast university academic enduring a midlife crisis. “I liked how it was totally a variation on Saul,” he says. “It’s more comic, there’s a lighter tone, but it’s very rich with human frailty and stupidity. I just loved the vibe of it. And obviously, [unlike Better Call Saul], it doesn’t have guns.”

Read more: Better Call Saul finale ending explained

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix in the UK and AMC in the US. Check out the best Netflix series and best Netflix movies to keep you entertained, or visit our TV guide for more to watch.

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