Bob Odenkirk on Normal: 'Something's weird in this town'
Best known for stellar turns in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Bob Odenkirk also has a distinguished CV as a comedy writer, sketch performer, director and screenwriter. As he returns to the big screen in mystery-action flick Normal, he talks to James Mottram about the intricacies of making good action movies, getting fit in his 50s and the potential danger of sequels
In Normal you play Ulysses, a temporary sheriff in a crooked Minnesotan town. What drew you to the story? I liked it because it had this mystery element in the first act: something’s weird in this town. We don’t know what it is. A lot of action movie scripts really just get the action to happen and then pack in as many sequences as you can, one right up against the other. And I just don’t really care about that. I’m still an interloper in the action field. I don’t even know how to understand a movie that is just action.
The town of Normal in the movie is based on a real place in Illinois. Did you want to show how many of these areas are facing financial hardship? I don’t know if it comes across, but the town is idyllic in a way that is hard to maintain without money. How do you even keep this alive? And the fact is, many of the towns in the midwest that I’m referencing here are at least half shut down, if not three-quarters. The stores are boarded up. There’s no one there. And you can’t keep a restaurant like the one in the film alive, and you certainly can’t keep a yarn shop going. There’s nobody buying yarn in bulk! So the idea is this town has an infusion of money from somewhere.
What made you go for British-born Ben Wheatley to direct? Was it his movie Free Fire, which feels like a cousin to Normal? I’m watching Free Fire, and the characters are relatable people with fear and uncertainty and tension that a lot of times is not a part of these action films. It’s like an impregnable fortress of a man takes on pure evil and vanquishes it over and over and over again. And so that’s all I was looking for. A human touch. I got a lot more than that in Ben Wheatley.
You co-star in Normal with Henry Winkler aka The Fonz from Happy Days, who plays the mayor. Give us your best Winkler anecdote… The only person I can compare him to is Paul McCartney: the only other person I’ve been close to that’s that famous. Henry is aware of how beloved he is and by how many people of different ages. And I had to tell him to stop being Henry Winkler, so that he could act the scene, which he did.
You perform a lot of your own stunts here. Were you always in such good shape? No, I was a comedy writer! I only exercised because I felt I had to. Somewhere around the age of 30 I started, and I really reluctantly did two times a week. And then I went up to probably four times a week, just because you kind of have to do something. And so when I was about 50 years old, I had the notion of doing an action movie, and I started training around 52.
You’re 63 now. How do you find the action scenes? I like doing action. It’s a bit like sketch comedy, to be honest with you. Action sequences are three to five minutes long, and hopefully they have a journey. They set a tone and then they go there and build it, and then they turn, just like a sketch. And so that’s been something I was very surprised to find and, of course, I relate to that.
You first did extreme action in 2019 movie Nobody. What was a bigger risk: that or making a Breaking Bad spin-off? Both things could have backfired on me, but I think Better Call Saul would have been the bigger backfire. It would have been a reference point forever about sequels and when you shouldn’t do a sequel when you’ve made a show as good as Breaking Bad. There was so much riding on it, but all credit to showrunners Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan whose instincts are to do great work.
What are you up to next? I’m trying to direct this TV show that my son wrote. It’s got some DNA from The Royle Family which I showed him when he was young. So he grew up and wrote this show about a family in Encino, California.
Normal is in cinemas from Friday 15 May; Better Call Saul is on Netflix.