The worst movie Bob Odenkirk ever made: “That was kind of a debacle”
Bob Odenkirk might well be so famous now after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul that he can convincingly pass himself off as the Pope, as he did at last week’s NFL Honors Awards, but it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t occasionally look at his back catalogue and grimace a bit.
Aside from those two monumental shows, Odenkirk has also had a movie run of late that has really landed with the public, with his unlikely role as a bloodthirsty vigilante action hero on Nobody and its sequel last year both garnering serious acclaim, as he ran around smashing people’s teeth in at an age most people are sitting down in a comfy chair with a Sunday supplement eating crumpets.
And if you enjoyed those, then another Odenkirk beat-em-up also slipped by the radar last year with the Ben Wheatley-directed gem Normal, which saw him as a small-town sheriff having to take on bank-robbing gangs, with a script penned by Derek Kolstad, who came up with the John Wick franchise.
Of course movies weren’t the focus of the actor’s career for a considerable time, not just due to Breaking Bad and BCS, for which he picked up a staggering 13 Emmy nominations and five Golden Globe nods, but also for a recurring role in the Fargo series plus a stand-out appearance in hectic cooking series The Bear, which again earned him an Emmy nomination.
Long ago, in the early 1990s, Odenkirk made his name firstly as a Saturday Night Live writer and then for Ben Stiller’s show, where he met fellow comedian David Cross. Together, the pair founded their own project, Mr Show with Bob and David, which became something of a jumping-off point for comedians, including Sarah Silverman and Jack Black and eventually ran for four seasons on HBO.
The show was critically well-received and award-nominated enough so that when it was finally cancelled after a four-year run, the pair decided to try to make a spin-off movie, which did not go in any way to plan, especially after the studio and director took creative control away from them.
Cross played the lead role of Ronnie Dobbs, while Odenkirk popped up in several supporting parts, while a laundry list of comedians made guest appearances, including Patton Oswalt, Jeff Goldblum and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, but it wasn’t enough to save it from flopping and going straight to video.
Stone and Odenkirk recalled the release while chatting to NPR, with the latter saying, “We did do a movie, Run Ronnie Run. That was kind of a debacle of its own”, while Cross added, “We assumed it was going to be a collaborative work in which we’d have kind of the same amount of control that we had on our show, what made us successful enough to get to do this movie.”
Odenkirk, who since finishing his stint as Saul Goodman has had many fans hope that he would go on to appear in a spin-off similar to Breaking Bad’s El Camino, continued, “Once it was done shooting, we were out, completely out, like, totally frozen out…and that’s where you make a movie, in editing”.
Meanwhile, he may well have to keep his fighting skills sharp as, thanks to the success of the two Nobody movies, a third instalment is widely expected to be greenlit, with the series’ director Timo Tjahjanto hinting at darker storylines, while the starring actor himself has expressed interest in doing another two films at least.
