How Bob Odenkirk’s Heart Attack Rocked ‘Better Call Saul’

As Better Call Saul headed into its homestretch, fans were abuzz with how the acclaimed Breaking Bad prequel would end. What would happen to Saul-only characters like Kim Wexler and Lalo Salamanca? How much would we see of events from the Breaking Bad years, and how much more time would be spent post-Breaking Bad with Saul’s new identity as Gene from Cinnabon? And, most importantly, exactly when, how, and why would Jimmy McGill, a shady but mostly decent attorney, fully transform into the amoral version of Saul Goodman we knew from the previous show?

Then, on July 27, 2021, a shocking real-world development put into question whether the series would get any kind of ending at all. On a break during filming of the final season’s eighth episode in Albuquerque, star Bob Odenkirk suffered a massive heart attack. Suddenly, those other questions were irrelevant to Saul co-creator Peter Gould, who only cared about the survival and health of his leading man and friend, and who assumed the series would stop abruptly if Odenkirk died or simply couldn’t return. In this exclusive excerpt from my new book, Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul (out Feb. 4), Gould shares his perspective on the day of the heart attack and its aftermath, what had to change in production once Odenkirk was able to resume work, what it was like for Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn to film their final scene together, and what Gould thinks might have happened between Jimmy and Kim afterwards. 

What was the day of Bob’s heart attack like for you?
I was back in L.A. Vince [Gilligan] called me because he had been directing when it happened, and said, “Melissa [Bernstein] and I are in a car, we’re following an ambulance. Bob collapsed on the set, and it really doesn’t look good.” My first instinct was to run to Albuquerque — I didn’t, because there were plenty of people hovering around, worried. I helped out with coordinating getting Bob’s family to Albuquerque, and Sony was fantastic with this.

After shutting down for a few days, we just had no idea what his status was going to be. I talked to his wife, Naomi. I spoke to Rhea Seehorn, and she was as upset as I’ve ever heard anybody. It was a great feeling of helplessness, of not knowing what was going to happen next. And then, pretty soon, amazingly enough, I don’t remember exactly the timeline, but I was on the phone with Bob himself, and I could hear he was himself, but he wasn’t remembering things quite right. He was in the room with Naomi and he said, “Peter, I have nothing to do here. Please send me a script so I can study up. I know you don’t like to send them too early.” And Naomi was off mic going, “No, no, you don’t send him anything!” Because literally, the doctors said he 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 realize it’s just a fucking piece of entertainment.

That was an awful time. Rosa Estrada was our medical advisor, and then she was in charge of all of our Covid stuff. And because she was there, that’s one of the reasons he’s alive today.

I spoke to her on the phone, and you’re just talking to everybody, hoping that maybe talking about it’s going to make you feel better, but just also being in incredible suspense and being very worried about Bob’s family. That was the experience. And then bit by bit, I’d hear from him on the phone. I hadn’t seen him. And then we’d hear, “The doctors say he might be able to come back at this point in time, but we’re going to have to watch out for him.” And so, Bob’s doctors made some rules, and we made some rules about how he was going to work, because Bob is a workaholic. He’s intense.

You think about Better Call Saul, he has five- or 10-page scenes, sometimes a couple of them a week. And he prepares like crazy for those. He knows all the dialogue. He knows all the beats. He’s worked with the other actors before he gets to the set. We had to really think about how we were going to handle that.

I was in Albuquerque for when he came back. It was such a feeling to have him walk onto the stage, and the way he talked to the crew, and the emotional intelligence he had about what people were feeling. I think he was more worried about what everybody else was feeling than anything about himself. The first shot we did was the very first shot you see of him in the season, a little pickup from that scene in the hotel room where they wake up together. And it’s a miracle, but it was very emotional. It was very tough for everybody. 

Obviously, Bob’s health, and the emotional well-being of his family, were all that really mattered at the beginning of this. But once you knew that he was going to live, but not necessarily how fully he would recover, did you, Vince, or anyone else allow yourselves to discuss what you would do if he couldn’t come back? Or if he could come back, but in a very limited way?
Not really. Most of our conversations were, “What can we keep shooting right now?” And we got very lucky, because at that point in the season, suddenly you had a lot of material with Mike and with Gus, and we had some little pickups to do for previous episodes. So we were only down for three or four days, and then the crew was back to work and shooting.

But look, if he hadn’t been himself… [long pause] It didn’t really bear thinking about, but I will say, I think we would’ve just dropped the show. I think Sony would’ve had to take a terrible financial loss, because it would be an utterly incomplete story. And they were shooting the scene that comes immediately after Lalo has shot Howard. There’s no rewriting to get around that. That’s about all I can say. 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.

Did you have to rewrite any of Bob’s material for the remaining episodes because of the doctors’ rules?
Alan, we didn’t change a damn thing. Writing-wise, we didn’t change a thing and we didn’t have to. If we had had something that was physically challenging, we would have had to figure out ways to shoot it so we would use more of a double.

The whole season was [filmed during] Covid. Because when we started the season, a lot of shows were coming back and what you heard in the business was, “Well, nobody can shoot a crowd scene. Everything’s going to be two, three people in a room. You can’t do this. You can’t do that.” And we said, “We’re not going to suddenly do a season that doesn’t feel like the rest of the show because of this. We can’t lower our standards or change the way the story’s told because of this external circumstance. We have to find a way around it.”

So it was more about giving him breaks than giving him different material?
Yeah. And scheduling so that he didn’t have too many consecutive big days. Bob was the one, he’d always say, “Oh, I can stay. Let me stay. I can stay a little longer to finish this.” But Melissa Bernstein and the rest of the producers just put the hammer down, and when the clock struck a certain hour, he turned back into a pumpkin and had to go home and relax. And as time went on, I actually think it was probably in some ways really good for every body because it kept us, for the most part, from doing something that the business is hopefully moving away from — doing crazy long hours.

The last scene you filmed was one of the last scenes of the show: Jimmy and Kim smoking together in the prison visitation room. How were Bob and Rhea doing at the end there? They get to share their final scene together, and then the experience is over. And how were you doing?
I think we were all exhausted, but sad and happy with what we had done. We all made speeches to the crew. We’re all wearing masks, making speeches with a microphone. They did a fantastic job in that scene. There’s very few words, but they found the beats, and I was so proud of it. I was so excited by what we had done.

Also, I was directing. So, when you’re directing, all you’re doing is thinking about, Am I getting it? I’m not thinking, Oh, this is the end of the 15-year-long journey. That didn’t really land for me until much, much later, but there were, along the way, all these little moments, like saying goodbye to Carol Burnett when she left.

It was a really hard season to shoot, especially because of Bob’s health, but also Covid and how ambitious the show was. It was just a really rough time — as rough as it could be with everybody being a good person. The really bad stuff happens if people are being shits to each other, and that never happened, but it was just physically and emotionally wearing. Having Carol come in when she did, toward the end after Bob had come back, just made everybody happy. She’s a magical, magical person. She’s so freaking smart about everything, and about people. She’s just very perceptive, but also generous. [It was like] she gave us all Prozac, and she gave us a lift from being there and being on the set. Then when she left, right at the beginning of shooting the finale, a little joy left the room. But I think everybody was mostly feeling good and we were proud of what we’d done.

Do you think that when they look at each other as Kim is walking to the exit, that’s the last Saul and Kim ever see of each other?
That sequence was not broken in the room. That was something I added as I was writing. What excited me about that was the sadness of it and the ambiguity of it. My hope and desire would be that the characters live on in the heads of the audience. So, a little bit of ambiguity is good.

In my mind, I could go back and forth, depends on what day you ask me. I find it hard to believe that she’s done with him. He’s in one of the most awful situations a human being can be in. Now having shot in a real prison, it’s a dire, dire place. It’s just awful, and it’s terrible that we have to have them. She knows he’s there. I find it hard to believe that she’s not going to call him, send him a letter, send him some cash to buy cigarettes, whatever.

And I find it hard to believe that he’s not going to make himself really useful to the other prisoners. It seems like he has already. He’s found a place of equilibrium in there. But I find it hard to believe that she would just walk away forever and never have any contact with him. On the other hand, it would be a big leap to think that they could get involved romantically again. Maybe, but my mother used to say this, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

Excerpt from the new book Saul Goodman V. Jimmy McGill by Alan Sepinwall published by Abrams Press, available Feb. 4.

From Rolling Stone US.