UnderdogMindset

28 years til first starring TV role

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Bob Odenkirk
Anthony Quintano / CC BY 2.0
Posted: Apr 3, 2023
Persistence TV

Bob Odenkirk has been in show business for a long time; he started as a writer for Saturday Night Live in 1987. He left SNL so he could go into performing but would continue to do both for many years—his biggest hit before 2009 was creating and starring in Mr. Show with David Cross.

His first mainstream breakthrough role was as the lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bob wouldn't get a breakthrough starring role until 2015 in Better Call Saul as the same lawyer. Bad. Odenkirk was 52 at the time, twenty-eight years since he first started. Both shows were a commercial and critical success.

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Quotes

It’s more than I could ever have dreamed somebody would give me a chance to do. Real actors, people who train for their lifetimes, hope for a role like this, so for me to get it is a crazy bit of lottery winning.

Bob Odenkirk

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “essential” (Entertainment Weekly), “hilarious” (AV Club) memoir, the star of Mr. Show, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul opens up about the highs and lows of showbiz, his cult status as a comedy writer, and what it’s like to reinvent himself as an action film ass-kicker at fifty.

References

  • The Transformation Of Bob Odenkirk From Childhood To Better Call Saul

    Nowadays, Odenkirk is a bonafide movie star. Every single step he took along the way to his current peak of fame played an essential role in getting him there — and we're here to explore them all. This is how Bob Odenkirk transformed himself from being a goofy kid growing up near Chicago into the star of "Better Call Saul."

  • Why Bob Odenkirk answered the call

    It IS pretty remarkable, given that Odenkirk wasn't known for doing drama at all. For 25 years he'd been making his living as a sketch comedy writer instead.

  • Emmy Breakout Bob Odenkirk on How ‘Better Call Saul’ Is a ‘Crazy Bit of Lottery Winning’

    Of all the characters who survived to the end of “Breaking Bad,” the sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman did not seem one of the likeliest to get his own spinoff series. But creator Vince Gilligan opted for Goodman, played by comic actor Bob Odenkirk, to be the focus of “Better Call Saul,” his first series since “Bad” ended in a blaze of gunfire and Emmys.

  • Breaking Bob: With Better Call Saul, Odenkirk Steps Into the Spotlight

    On Breaking Bad, the very casting of Odenkirk, whose acting career had been occupied mostly with sketch comedy and cameos — along with David Cross, he starred in HBO’s mid-’90s cult absurdist revue Mr. Show With Bob and David, and he also wrote for Saturday Night Live, The Ben Stiller Show, and Late Night With Conan O’Brien — came across as a sly signal that Gilligan had a highly pitched sense of humor, even if the show mostly didn’t. The role had been a huge career boost, the opposite of what Saul might refer to as having “a little shit-creek action going.”