Bob Odenkirk says he would have wanted Better Call Saul to move forward without him if he had not been “capable of doing it” following his heart attack on set in July of last year.
In a Fandom-shared clip from the Better Call Saul Season 6 Blu-ray, available now, co-creator Peter Gould notes that the “one thing” the show’s team didn’t anticipate was “our leading man experiencing a health crisis.” Odenkirk picks up from there, looking back on the “scary day” in question.
“It was a scary day for everybody there,” Odenkirk, who will next be seen in an adaptation of Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, said. “I’ve heard the stories. I mean, I really went down. I really turned gray. It really seemed over. They would have just stopped the show if I wasn’t capable of doing it. They wouldn’t have tried to go on, which makes me feel bad. If that had happened, I would have liked if they got some actor to play him just to tell the story that they’d written.”
While Odenkirk conceded that this “wouldn’t have been great,” he also pointed out it would have been “better than nothing.”
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Odenkirk previously credited getting fit for his well-received action entry Nobody with helping him survive the heart attack, which resulted in a brief hospitalization and saw the actor being required to take several weeks off from shooting Saul’s final season.
As for Straight Man, which is also an AMC production, the inaugural season of the new series is slated to premiere next year and will consist of eight hour-long episodes. Of course, the new series will mark Odenkirk’s third with the network, which makes sense given that triples is best.
