BETTER CALL SWOLE
The Better Call Saul star’s decision to channel his inner action hero for his new film Nobody changed his attitude to training. Bob Odenkirk is proof that age is no barrier to peak fitness
How Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk rebuilt his body for action
The branch, if you can call it that, extends about 30cm from the tree in Bob Odenkirk’s garden in Los Angeles. A few years ago, the 58-year-old actor paid no attention to it. But on a fresh sunny morning, he’s staring it down with a wry smile on his face. It’s pull-up time, and this barely grabbable chunk of wood is his bar. Odenkirk reaches up, grabs the branch firmly with both hands, tucks his knees to his chest and knocks out five reps.
“Pull-ups are one of the hardest exercises,” he explains, “but if you can do them – and I’ve become able to – then they can be fun.” He’s not joking.
You would never expect such bragging from the mild-mannered Odenkirk. After making his start in the 1990s as an alt-comedy writer and performer, he evolved into a serious actor on shows such as Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul – a series of roles that required zero physicality. For much of the past decade, he embodied Saul Goodman, an unimposing criminal defence lawyer who uses his wits, not his fists, to survive. However, in the new action thriller Nobody, out in early June, Odenkirk plays an unassuming father whose lethal skill set – yes, think Liam Neeson in the Taken series – emerges after a home robbery.
“No one thought I could do it,” he says of his transformation into a credible hard man. “The film
is unironic, extremely bloody and gratuitously violent.” But Odenkirk put the work in, and the man we see in Nobody is the result of three years’ hard training.
Odenkirk started by pouring his energies into the gym. He signed up with 87Eleven, the
Los Angeles-based action design company that sculpted Charlize Theron into Atomic Blonde shape and moulded Keanu Reeves into John Wick. Odenkirk felt instantly out of place. “They were probably thinking I’d last a month,” he says, “or that I’ll do the minimum and let a stunt guy come in and take my place in the fight sequences.”
He proved the naysayers wrong by connecting with the veteran action-stunt actor Daniel Bernhardt, who taught him the fundamentals of onscreen fighting, including moves borrowed from a variety of martial arts. Bernhardt also helped Odenkirk understand that cardio workouts made up of short bike rides and jogging weren’t worth his time and energy.
Instead, he gave the actor basic home circuit workouts, teaching him the value of exercises such as jump squats, press-ups, pull-ups and bench step-ups.
The more intense training awakened Odenkirk’s body.
After a few months, he was doing fewer but longer and more challenging bike rides up a winding neighbourhood hill. He would follow these up with Bernhardt’s mobility and upper-body exercises. Time spent grasping that longneglected branch in his garden is now a regular part of his workouts.
“You need renewed energy as you get older,” Odenkirk says. “Working out is when you can generate that energy.” And, we suggest, it’s when you can dream of facing up to Liam Neeson in Taken 4, too.
“I’m going to take that guy down the next time I see him,” Odenkirk says, laughing. “As long as there’s someone there to yell, ‘Cut!’ so neither of us gets hurt!”
“You need renewed energy as you get older. Working out generates that”