- 4 months ago
Bob Odenkirk goes online to answer the internet’s questions. The American actor responds to questions on Quora, Reddit and X, as well as fact-checking Wikipedia and replying to YouTube, TikTok and Instagram comments.Nobody 2 is in theaters August 15, 2025: https://www.nobody.movie----------Director: Kristen DeVoreDirector of Photography: Grant BellEditor: Robby MasseyTalent: Bob OdenkirkProducer: Sam DennisLine Producer: Jen SantosAssociate Producer: Brandon WhiteProduction Manager: James PipitoneProduction Coordinator: Elizabeth HymesTalent Booker: Meredith JudkinsCamera Operator: Lucas VilicichSound Mixer: Kari BarberProduction Assistant: Fernando Barajas; Abby DevinePost Production Supervisor: Jess DunnSupervising Editor: Rob LombardiAdditional Editor: Richard TrammellAssistant Editor: Justin Symonds
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00My daughter, when she was six, asked me,
00:02what's the most fun you ever had in show business?
00:04And I said to her, I did a sketch
00:06with a guy named Chris Farley once at Second City,
00:08and every night that I did that sketch,
00:11every single time I did it was the most fun
00:13I ever had in show business.
00:14Hey, GQ, I'm Bob Odenkirk,
00:17and today, I'm going undercover on the internet.
00:21It's actually me.
00:23It's me, for real.
00:32TikTok asks me, even though his name is different,
00:35he will always be Saul Goodman all the way.
00:37I believe a part of Bob wanted to be like Saul
00:39in the real life.
00:40I don't want to be like Saul, no.
00:42I want him to be like me.
00:44The good part of Saul is he does have a conscience.
00:46He does love people.
00:48He's almost been given a gift
00:50that he doesn't quite know what to do with.
00:53This gift for invention and story.
00:56He's a little like Tom Sawyer in that way,
00:58if you've ever read that book.
01:00Tom Sawyer has little plots and plans
01:04that he comes up with in there.
01:05They tend to be more elaborate than they need to be.
01:07And that's Saul.
01:09He gets carried away to the point
01:11where he doesn't see the blind spot in his plan.
01:15Reddit, are there certain parts of Breaking Bad
01:17you would play differently now that you know more
01:19about Jimmy's background?
01:20Yes.
01:22There's one line.
01:23It's one of the first episodes, maybe the first episode,
01:26with Saul.
01:27And Francesca, his assistant, is walking away.
01:30And he goes, God, you are killing me with that booty.
01:35That doesn't track for me with Saul as we know him.
01:40He's known Francesca for years at that point.
01:43And she is not his friend.
01:45She does not love him.
01:47I think I play it with a little more meanness because, really, she's a tough woman who looks him in the eye and says, you're full of shit.
01:57And some part of him really respects that.
02:00Mr. Odenkirk, between Scott Aukerman and Paul F. Tompkins, who was the worst employee on Mr. Show and why?
02:06Okay, so both these guys, Scott Aukerman from Comedy Bang Bang and many other projects, and Paul F. Tompkins from Varietopia, they were both writers on Mr. Show.
02:17Even though they both contributed wonderful, funny things, I'm going to give Paul F. Tompkins the worser employee on Mr. Show.
02:26Paul had a more critical, I think, attitude about the whole effort of writing the show.
02:33I think he would proudly wear the mantle, although he wasn't by any means the worst employee at Mr. Show.
02:39Dat boys on Reddit boy, what is your favorite moment you've had on the set of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul?
02:47Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul were my first and, in some ways, hardest experiences with acting, where the harder the scene is to do, the more rewarding it is to do.
03:00The fight with Kim in the final season of Better Call Saul, where she says, I'm leaving you, and there's an argument that we have.
03:09We go into the kitchen, we go into the bedroom, is really, like, one of the greatest things I've been given the chance to do.
03:19What do you say to your fans who have crushes on you?
03:22You're nuts. You're nuts. Thanks, though.
03:25Somebody writes, I need to know what line Bob is most proud of in this. Oh, a van down by the river.
03:32So I wrote the motivational speaker sketch for Chris Farley when we were at Second City together.
03:39In the course of rehearsal, I got to know Chris, and one night I went home and I wrote that sketch the way it's done.
03:46I've written hundreds of sketches and maybe a couple thousand, maybe. That's one of the few that is, in its final form, pretty much exactly what I wrote in my apartment alone one night in Chicago, which is cool and weird and rare.
04:03So, my favorite line, um, is that Bill Shakespeare over there?
04:08I can't see real good. Is that Bill Shakespeare over there?
04:11Just kills me. I mean, I'm a Midwestern guy, and I'm always gonna call William Shakespeare Bill Shakespeare.
04:18We did the sketch at Second City first, and I was in the cast, and I played the dad, the part that Phil Hartman played on SNL.
04:25Chris would not leave that stage until he made every other performer laugh every single time he did the sketch.
04:31My daughter, when she was six, asked me, what's the most fun you ever had in show business?
04:35I said to her, I did a sketch with a guy named Chris Farley once at Second City, and every night that I did that sketch,
04:41every single time I did it was the most fun I ever had in show business.
04:46Hi, Bob. Any plans for another Mr. Show reunion?
04:49Well, I don't know if it's a Mr. Show reunion, but David Cross and I climbed Machu Picchu together, and we documented it.
04:56And there's more to it than that. We're cutting that movie right now.
05:01Hey, how about we check Quora? I never heard of it.
05:05Why does Bob Odenkirk always wear a suit?
05:08What? I don't always wear a suit.
05:12Many of my characters are lawyers and agents and flim-flam men, and they wear suits.
05:17I think I'll look decent in a suit, but in real life I don't wear suits.
05:21I do have two suits now. I didn't have any suits for quite a while.
05:27But I have two suits now. But when am I going to wear them?
05:30Not for GQ, obviously.
05:33Does Bob Odenkirk know martial arts? No.
05:37I know film acting fights, moves. I know screen film fight moves, which is built out of martial arts, but isn't martial arts at all.
05:52I am not a real fighter. I am a fake fighter.
05:56Did Bob Odenkirk write for The Simpsons? I did not write for The Simpsons.
06:01I was almost a writer at The Simpsons.
06:06I had written at Saturday Night Live for three years.
06:09Then I wrote on a show called Get A Life.
06:11And Sam Simon, one of the original writers, and Heidi Perlman,
06:15I went in for an interview and they liked me and offered me the chance to write there.
06:20And I passed on it because I wanted to act more.
06:24And I knew that The Simpsons was a lot of work.
06:27Oh my God, is that still a thing? Really?
06:31I left that like two years ago.
06:34Evan Yu says, who would win, Mansell versus Wick?
06:38Oh, definitely John Wick.
06:39Hutch wouldn't quit until he was completely dead.
06:43But John Wick would win.
06:45Can we do what happens when Saul comes out of jail?
06:47If I'm right and he gets a break for good behavior,
06:50he's still going to be like 87 when he gets out of prison.
06:54And I'll do that show.
06:56If we do it the same way as we did Better Call Saul, I'll need to be 105 to play 87.
07:02I'll forever be torn between this finale and Bob Odenkirk and Curb Your Enthusiasm as a former porn actor,
07:07describing having a crew member shoving a Tabasco covered finger in his ass.
07:11Iconic work either way. Is there nothing he can't do?
07:13I can't sing. I can't sing.
07:17But I'm going to try to. Watch out.
07:19Caesar says, why is Bob Odenkirk's The Room remake supposed to have been released in June
07:24and there's still zero news about it.
07:26Hey, I agree, Caesar. I want to see it.
07:29There's like a clip of one scene and it made me really happy.
07:33So I just want to tell everybody what I did.
07:35For charity, we reenacted not all of it, but most of the movie The Room.
07:42I had a great time and my goal was to try to make the lines work as written.
07:48Really try to make them have an emotional through line and ground them.
07:53It was a real challenge.
07:55And I know I failed, but I also know I succeeded here and there, which is wild.
08:00I would love to see it.
08:01I think there's legal ramifications.
08:04You'd have to ask the filmmaker.
08:06Odenkirk auditioned for the role of Michael Scott before it went to Corral.
08:10He later appeared in season nine.
08:11Odenkirk went on to play Jimmy McGill, Saul Goodman.
08:14They both have best, second best, insert job mugs.
08:17Is that connection on purpose? No, it's not on purpose.
08:20It's just a thing that people do when they work anywhere.
08:23They eventually get a mug, a personalized novelty mug.
08:27Don't you have one yet?
08:31YouTube asks, I just think this character had to be such a nice change of pace for him because he's a sweetie pie.
08:37Bill Oswalt, the deputy I played on Fargo, was naive and innocent in a way.
08:43And he's trying to protect his innocence, which is weird because when you meet him you think he's an asshole.
08:48He was nice to play, a great, great character to play.
08:52And a great thing to look for when you're an actor, apart with that self-awareness that real people have.
08:59Even if they're awful people, that every once in a while they look in the mirror and go, I think I might be an awful person.
09:06And then here's me in Arrested Development with my friend David Cross playing a therapist.
09:11Everyone forgets how Bob helped produce the greatest sitcom of all time, Arrested Development.
09:16I did not produce that show. I was a guest actor on it.
09:20But thank you for thinking I did.
09:22And it is, if not one of the greatest, the greatest.
09:25I actually hesitate to call it a sitcom because it feels so expansive compared to a sitcom.
09:31But man, it was great to be included in that show.
09:34Manson Lassi from The Ben Stiller Show and one of the other sketches.
09:39I wrote this sketch exactly the way we do it.
09:41The story goes they knew they were getting canceled. Not true.
09:44So they blew the entire budget getting the production values just right for this sketch.
09:48No, we got the production values right for this sketch as we did in many sketches on The Ben Stiller Show.
09:53Because Ben is a real filmmaker who loves film, studied film, cares about lenses and lighting and DPs and all that shit.
10:03And that's why this is such a good looking sketch.
10:06And so are many of the pieces on The Ben Stiller Show.
10:10Ah, the audition from Mr. Show.
10:13This is such a technical sketch, especially the confused look of Bob Odenkirk.
10:17I play a casting director and David Cross is doing an audition.
10:21And this piece was written by the man sitting next to me, Dino Stamatopoulos, who was on a show called Community.
10:27And Dino wrote this sketch, The Audition.
10:29I wish I could say I wrote it because it's maybe the best pure sketch ever on Mr. Show.
10:36Instagram says,
10:38The carnival worker getting his butt beat is what stirred a hornet's nest.
10:41Can't wait to watch the fights and see how Hutch makes it out of this one in the trailer he's talking about.
10:47The carnival worker who kind of thoughtlessly slaps my daughter character on the back of the head.
10:54The key to that, to me, was that that guy's slap is like just, even the guy who did it was like, why do I, why did I do that?
11:02What an asshole move.
11:04I shouldn't have done that.
11:05But it's like a minor thing, but it's horrible.
11:08It's horrible.
11:09But it's also nothing.
11:11It's like, let it go.
11:13Walk away.
11:14But Hutch can't do that.
11:16Nobody 2, someone said,
11:18It's like John Wick and National Lampoon had a baby.
11:21It's glorious.
11:22Yeah, sure.
11:23I guess so.
11:24I feel like the DNA of nobody is closer to Death Wish and a Jackie Chan film mixed.
11:32And yes, the National Lampoon vacation reference is a great one.
11:37I wanted the second film to be about a vacation, a family vacation.
11:42It is very much tied to National Lampoon, which the comedy of that, of those vacation films, was based on family vacations
11:49and all the frustrations that are a part of this thing where all you're trying to do is have a good time.
11:55Wikipedia.
11:58He said his strongest comedic influence was Monty Python's Flying Circus, primarily due to its combination of cerebral humor and verbal slapstick.
12:08That's definitely, utterly true.
12:11Unlike a lot of people in comedy, I didn't get into comedy because of stand-up comedy.
12:16I got in because of sketch comedy, which I very much loved.
12:20And Monty Python was my favorite.
12:23And it was the combination of cerebral humor and I wouldn't say verbal slapstick.
12:28I don't really know what that is.
12:30I would just say silliness.
12:33I think I like Eric Idle's writing the best.
12:36Nudge, nudge, wink, wink is brilliant.
12:39But I also love things like Deja Vu, the Olympic hide-and-seek competition.
12:44I kind of liked it all.
12:46You know, as a writer, the hardest thing to write is the stuff that Eric wrote.
12:51Clean, tight sketches that could be vaudevillian, really.
12:55All right, guys.
12:56Thank you very much.
12:57I am going to sign off the internet right now.
13:02Just kidding.
13:03I'm going to watch the Cubs game.
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