Bob Odenkirk Would Like to Remind You That Life Is a Meaningless Farce

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**David Marchese** (0:35)
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm David Marchese.
Bob Odenkirk has had one of show business' most wonderfully improbable careers. After decades as a cult hero in the comedy world, thanks mostly to his 90s sketch series Mr. Show with Bob and David, he became a mainstream success, as of all things, a serious dramatic actor. First in a supporting part as the shifty lawyer Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad, and then to further acclaim as the star of that show's spinoff Better Call Saul. Lately, his career has taken another turn that few could have seen coming, to action movie star. The latest example is called Normal. In it, Odenkirk plays a small town Minnesota sheriff facing off against, among other villains, the Yakuza. You might think that at 63 years old, Odenkirk would be pretty pleased with the way his career and life have shaken out. But you'd be wrong. Here's my conversation with Bob Odenkirk.
Bob, I think we're good to go if you're good to go.

**Bob Odenkirk** (1:41)
This is a big production, as I said to you when we were just sitting down. It just feels very important in a way that scares the shit out of me. But onwards.
All right.

**David Marchese** (1:55)
I don't want you to be scared. There's nothing to be scared of. It's all in your head. There's nothing bad that's going to happen.

**Bob Odenkirk** (2:01)
There's a lot in my head. All the bad stuff.

**David Marchese** (2:05)
But thank you again for being here. Just before I was told that we got the green light to start, you were telling me about a novel you just read.

**Bob Odenkirk** (2:14)
Yeah.

**David Marchese** (2:14)
How it affected your thinking maybe about something important that happened to you. So pick up where you left off.

**Bob Odenkirk** (2:20)
Yeah. So almost four years ago, I had this heart incident. One of the tributaries to my widow-maker artery was shut down completely by a plaque buildup.
I was really out and I went to the hospital. I got two stents. I really went down on the set of Better Call Saul. It was really scary, especially for everyone around me, not for me because I don't have any memory of it. But I've talked about it many times and people have asked me many times how did that affect you? I think first people want to hear that you saw a white light, then they would love to hear that you watched your whole life pass before you. Was that film real?
And I kind of wish that happened to me. That would have been cool, but that didn't happen to me. It was a blank for me for a week. I came to essentially a week later. I came to the next day, but I don't have any memories till a week later.
So I've tried to answer this question to people, how did it impact you? And I've had a hard time doing it because I've always felt I don't do justice to the feeling of it, the experience of it. Okay, so then I'm reading this book, that novel that's called On the Calculation of Volume, and I'm reading this book, and the character in this book is having a very unique experience of time, and she's relating her experience of reliving the same day over and over. And I come to these passages, and I'm like, that's how I felt. That's exactly how I felt for weeks after having this heart attack. And I could, there's like a couple passages in here that I marked because I'm like, I've never been able to express this to people.

**David Marchese** (4:10)
Yeah, can you read one?

**Bob Odenkirk** (4:11)
Yeah, I'll read you a section to show you what I mean.
She says that in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. She's talking about the world around us and ourselves. That we manage to stay afloat, that we exist at all, that each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. She goes on like that, and I marked that whole passage. But then later, and I'll just read this one section, I had a day to go and I went with it. There was no plan. There was an outline, one which I could follow, floating gently. There was no gull, no prey to be caught. I was not a circling raptor, a vulture, a shark, a big cat poised to spring. I was not on my guard.