A turn to violence
Actor Bob Odenkirk tells Karl Quinn how he tapped into Trumpian rage for his latest Nobody role.
B‘I’m acknowledging we feel at times powerless, and we want to push back on a world that can get so big and feel out of hand, and there are moments in life and incidents in life that can make us feel victimised.’ BOB ODENKIRK, left, plays Hutch Mansell in Nobody
OB Odenkirk is, he insists, ‘‘on the liberal side of politics’’. But there’s an unmistakable Trumpian whiff about Nobody, a revenge thriller in which he plays a downtrodden schlub who taps into his innerrage after a home invasion upends his life.
‘‘It starts from a dad, a breakin, a feeling of frustration and resentment because he was not able to fight back,’’ Odenkirk says. ‘‘That’s the right thing to do to diminish the impact on yourself and your family, but it doesn’t sit well with him, and he kind of snaps.’’
The seed for the film came from real-life trauma: Odenkirk’s home was broken into while he and his wife and kids were there – twice, in fact, eight years apart.
‘‘The first time was particularly traumatic,’’ he says. ‘‘As a dad, I felt the right thing to do was nothing. We made it through with minimum damage but still, the experience has never left me, and I’ve always wondered if I should have been more proactive.’’
Around five years ago, he took this ‘‘nugget of an idea’’ to Derek Kolstad, the writer of the John Wick movies. What Kolstad came back with was a story in which the hero, Hutch, is a former FBI hitman who has ‘‘overcorrected’’ in his bid to live a normal life, repressing his primal instincts, emotionally and sexually adrift from his wife (Connie Neilsen), trapped in the repetition of a dead-end job (in that most Trumpian of settings, a metalwork factory), until a chance encounter with some Russian mobsters trips a switch inside him. ‘‘And he ran with it into fantasy land,’’ says Odenkirk.
Playing an action hero – albeit one who spends much of the film being beaten to a pulp – is a major gear change for Odenkirk, but it is not entirely surprising. He is a master of reinvention, a comedian (he started as a writer for Saturday Night Live) who has become most famous for a character who is himself reinvented over the course of two drama series: as shonky lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad, and as Jimmy McGill, the man Goodman used to be, in the prequel Better Call Saul.
Indeed, he says over a video call from his home in Los Angeles, he also owes this latest act of reinvention to his most famous role(s).
‘‘I thought most people don’t know my comedy, but they know me as this striving guy who fails, gets knocked down, never quits, comes back and tries again,’’ says Odenkirk. ‘‘That’s kind of an action-film lead, except I don’t fight. So I thought if I could learn to fight. . .’’
That took more than two years of intense gym sessions, MMA training, gun handling and the like. He does all his own stunts in the film but says, ‘‘I’m not deluded that what I learned is actually fighting; it’s not. It’s screen fighting.
‘‘It’s nice to get more comfortable with your body, to get a sense of control over your body, but please don’t come my way if you’re looking for a fight. I will not fight you. And if I do, you’ll probably beat me.’’
The most real thing in the film is the sense of frustration and impotence Hutch feels when he chooses not to fight back. At an allegorical level, it’s like we’re seeing the ‘‘neutered’’ America decried by Trump’s supporters – enfeebled, timorous, afraid to act decisively. And when he snaps,
it’s like we’re seeing America Made Great Again. So how does all that sit with a professed liberal who believes in gun control?
‘‘I’m acknowledging we feel at times powerless, and we want to push back on a world that can get so big and feel out of hand, and there are moments in life and incidents in life that can make us feel victimised,’’ says Odenkirk. ‘‘And in a movie, in a play, in Shakespeare – and I know we’re not Shakespeare – you can see violence and rage as a natural drive that you watch play out in a drama.’’
If Hutch were to live on, Odenkirk insists he wouldn’t want just another action franchise, but rather an exploration of the ramifications of his turn to violence.
‘‘I think you tend to lose more than you gain in a violent act,’’ he says. ‘‘That’s what I’d pursue: some kind of controlled journey for him to go on, with a degree of comeuppance or blowback from the action.’’
For now, though, he’s happy with the film as an exercise in radical honesty.
‘‘The way I look at it, these are real feelings that we all have, if we’re willing to acknowledge them, and you have to find places to play them out. ‘‘And honestly,’’ he says, ‘‘for me this movie was cathartic.’’ – The Age
Nobody (R16) is now screening in cinemas nationwide.