Bob Odenkirk has said he turned down the chance to reprise the role of crooked lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul twice and only took the part after his children intervened.
Speaking on Friday night's Late Late Show, the 60-year-old actor said that the role came at just the right time for him when he joined the cast of Breaking Bad in 2008.
"Well, some of them are my friends!"
— The Late Late Show (@RTELateLateShow) April 15, 2023
We have @mrbobodenkirk's kids to thank for him saying yes to @BetterCallSaul 😅#LateLate pic.twitter.com/s9822yJY1X
"Hollywood careers are up and down, and I was in a down, but I was OK," he said. "I’d done very well as a young comedy writer. I’d won a couple of Emmys, I had a couple of shows on TV but then I was struggling, I had two kids and then I got a call out of the blue.
"I’d never seen Breaking Bad, and I was invited to play this character Saul Goodman and they told me what the character was, and I thought yeah, I could play that guy. He’s actually from Chicago and he’s a sleazy lawyer who’s always conning ya and playing ya . . . that sounds like fun."
However, when a chance to reprise the role came along in 2015 with Better Call Saul, Odenkirk wasn’t in a position to take the part.
"We shot those shows in New Mexico and that’s pretty far from LA. They really wanted to do it, they really wanted to do that show and it was exciting to think I could do a show like that, but my kids were 13 and 15 and there was too much going on at home. I couldn’t leave that with my wife, she had her own company, so I had to say no both times.
"But the kids overheard me on the phone saying no and after I’d hung up, my son looked at me and said `you’re not going to do that show, huh?' I said, `no, I don’t think we can handle it as a family' and he said `you’re gonna disappoint a lot of people' and I said, `no, I’m going to disappoint a lot of strangers' and he said, `well some of them are my friends . . . '
"Then we talked about it, and both my kids came to me on the same day and told me I should do it. my wife was perfectly fine with me doing it or not doing it. I’m very happy that my son overheard that phone call."
Odenkirk has been travelling around Ireland for the past two weeks and speaking about being here at the same time as President Joe Biden, he said, "I get to my hotel and it’s a nice hotel but there’s a lot of security for Saul. I’m in the same hotel as the president. It was a total SNAFU - on Biden’s part.
Me, Aisling, and some fella in ol'Dublin tonite to chat away til 4 evah pic.twitter.com/5QS0DG9Xpk
— Mr. Bob Odenkirk (@mrbobodenkirk) April 13, 2023
"Luckily, a lot of people know me from the movie Nobody, a lot of security people, the cops, so they were very happy to see me, and they let me in. I’m very proud of Biden, I’m proud of him.
"I’ve been following the visit and I’m loving every bit of it."
Saul Goodman, real name Jimmy McGill, is an Irish American from Chicago and Odenkirk, who is one of seven kids in his family, also talked about his own Irish roots, revealing that he had two Irish grandmothers.
"McCormack and Doolin were their names and I just found out today that they’re both from Cork so there was a little bit of tension between them, but I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what the history of it is. I hope there wasn’t a war in Cork that I didn’t hear about.
"I’m always happy to be in Ireland," he added, "I used to come here when I was a writer for Saturday Night Live, I wrote there for five years, and it’s quicker to Ireland then to LA and it’s also less cynical."
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