Bob Odenkirk has admitted that he has no plans to return to Better Call Saul.
The actor played the character Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman in the series, as well as in Breaking Bad, for 11 seasons from 2008-2022.
In July 2021, he also collapsed after suffering a heart attack while filming the show’s sixth and final season, before returning to complete the series’ finale.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Odenkirk, who is currently starring in Nobody 2, said that while he would return to his current role as Hutch Mansell, he wasn’t so keen on coming back to Better Call Saul.
“Both Hutch Mansell in Nobody and Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul have a lot of impacted frustration inside them. They’re guys who, for different reasons, have pretty big chips on their shoulders, and that’s hard to play after a while,” Odenkirk said.
“You can’t just carry that guy around all the time. So I’m fine with moving on from them both, although I would do more Hutch. I would do a third or fourth [Nobody] film.”
Peter Gould, co-creator of Better Call Saul, previously said that he and the showrunners weren’t sure whether the show would continue following Odenkirk’s heart attack.
He said at the time: “The doctors said [Odenkirk] needs to sit in a room lit by candlelight and he needs time to recover. Honest to God, we didn’t know if we were going to have a show or if we were going to finish it. And it felt so completely irrelevant, because it’s when you realise it’s just a fucking piece of entertainment.”
He continued: “We were ready to dump the whole thing. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about that. It’s too complicated. It was too big to really kind of think it through. But I’m sure somebody deep in the bowels of Sony had to start doing some calculations about what kind of loss they’d have to take, and thank God it didn’t happen.”
Odenkirk himself spoke out about the heart attack in 2022, saying that “If nobody had been there, I’d have been dead in a few minutes.”
Elsewhere, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s new project for Apple TV+, Pluribus starring Better Call Saul‘s Rhea Seehorn, is due to be released later this year.
Speaking about the show, Odenkirk said: “It’s going to be the biggest thing, well, since sliced bread, but really since Game Of Thrones. You probably know what’s biggest [lately], but probably since Severance. I know Severance, in its way, is a big, big effort. So I think that [Pluribus] is going to be the next big show, and I can’t wait.”
