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For 12 years, award-winning comedic writer Bob Odenkirk, 60, flexed his dramatic acting muscles playing the iconic role of attorney Saul Goodman (aka Jimmy McGill) in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. In the new AMC+ dramedy Lucky Hank, he switches gears from lawyer to professor as a disgruntled English department chair at an underfunded college in Pennsylvania’s Rust Belt.
You play an English professor in Lucky Hank. Did you ever consider majoring in English?
It’s interesting. I wish I majored in English. I didn’t. I majored in broadcasting at Southern Illinois University. I wanted to be a writer when I was that age, which makes me wonder why I didn’t major in English. As far as writing goes, I never took a class outside of the normal English class. Nothing advanced. But I read like crazy. I wanted to be a novelist until I got a glimpse of my writing. I did. I sort of pursued it diligently and then quite naturally gave it up to write sketch comedy shows, which I of course loved very much.
What’s on your reading list?
When? This week? I’m reading Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby — really fun. Real Estate by Deborah Levy. How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Five Decembers, a noir novel by James Kestrel. And well, we’ll just stop there. Oh, Rachel Aviv, her book Strangers to Ourselves, I’m into. As well as, of course, The New Yorker, which is the best magazine.
Did you have a favorite teacher?
I did have a favorite teacher. It was [Naperville High School] chemistry teacher Mr. [Lee] Marek, who used to go on [Late Night With] David Letterman. Do you remember him? He would do funny experiments. He made Dave laugh. A very clever guy. An open-minded, fun guy. I didn't like chemistry at all. In fact, it’s the only class I ever got a D in, and he gave it to me, but I still loved him and I loved his class. He encouraged my playfulness, my silliness. Additionally, I loved my junior high teachers. They were the ones who really gave me a boost as far as going into show business. They let me do all my reports as performances, as plays that I wrote. I would do them around the school.
Your character, Hank, seems to be having a midlife crisis. Having just turned 60, do you know anything about that?
Do I? It’s bound to happen. I think it's a version of the crisis that you have all through life as you reach different levels of growth and change — chapters really — in your life. I think it’s your relationship to life and to how long we live. I had a heart attack a year and a half ago, and that brought it into focus, but I think everybody has some sense of that — or most people do — and it’s really how you revisit your existential presence. Like, how you go, Wait, who am I again? People tend to do it around their early 30s and then around 50 again. Those are just moments where you go [in your 30s], I'm not going to live forever, and do I want to have a family? Or, in the case of your 50s, What do I want to do with hopefully a good chunk of time to enjoy my life?
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