The sketch comedy legend turned action star Bob Odenkirk brought a sneak peek of his new movie Normal to the Normal Theater on Thursday for a sold-out crowd.
The Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul actor introduced the film and answered questions after the screening, alongside frequent collaborator and Normal screenwriter Derek Kolstad.
In the movie, Odenkirk becomes the interim sheriff in the (fictional) town of Normal, Minnesota, right before a botched bank robbery uncovers the town’s deepest, darkest secret. Odenkirk said the movie was initially called The Interim but was later changed to Normal.
“Of course, the name is the best. And of course, for movie audiences, a town called Normal just … they’re like, ‘Something’s not normal. I know something’s wrong!’ That’s a great thing walking into the theater suspecting,” Odenkirk said. “So we’re here because we borrowed your town name.”
The movie was filmed in Canada. And the movie’s Normal (population of just over 1,000) is much smaller than Normal, Illinois.
“This is a bigger town than the one pictured in this movie. But in a lot of ways, I think the town in this movie is representative of a lot of towns in America,” Odenkirk said.
Normal is the latest foray into the action genre for Odenkirk, whose career started as a writer at Saturday Night Live and later as the creator of the seminal sketch comedy series Mr. Show. Mr. Show was a cult favorite, especially among writers – a fact that put him on the radar of the Breaking Bad writers’ room when they needed someone to portray the sleezy lawyer Saul Goodman.
“I can’t point to too many performances in Mr. Show that indicate I should be Saul Goodman. But based on that, they just gave me this role,” he said. “I was thinking, I’m gonna walk on this set and they’re gonna look at me and go, ‘Oh, is there another Bob Odenkirk? Because you’re not…no.’”
Turns out, he was the right choice. Breaking Bad and its spinoff, Better Call Saul, were hailed by critics and fans alike. Odenkirk was nominated for multiple Emmys for playing Goodman.
Odenkirk’s career morphed again in 2021 with the action movie Nobody, about a family man who inadvertently gets into a violent war with a Russian crime boss after a break-in at his home.
The surprising pivot was deliberate, Odenkirk said, though he knew he had some challenges to overcome to fit into the genre.
“I tried to bring something special, something nobody else is bringing, which is a guy you really don’t suspect of being able to do much,” he said. “And a guy who is getting degraded as he fights. Because a lot of the action heroes of the last 20 years are kind of super human. They don’t get weaker. They’re always at top energy level. And I wanted to play a guy who got hurt, and the more the movie went you went, ‘Poor guy, he’s not making it!’”
Odenkirk sees a connection between his action era and Saul Goodman.
“I had a notion that the character I played in Saul was kind of like an action character except he didn’t fight. He strove for something. He kept getting put down. He kept fighting back. He never stopped. And he kind of led with his heart, but you didn’t see it. You just saw all his cleverness,” Odenkirk said. “So all I gotta do is learn to fight.”
Nobody and Nobody 2 barely nod to Odenkirk’s comedy roots, with very little winking and nodding. Normal has more levity. All three were written by Derek Kolstad, who joined Odenkirk on stage at the Normal Theater on Thursday. Kolstad is also the writer of the John Wick trilogy, one of the fewer major original franchises of the 21st century.
The John Wick films are loaded with violence, lore, and secret worlds. But the name John Wick is grounded in a very real person.
“The character is named after my grandfather, who died last year. He was 98,” Kolstad said. “By the way, he didn’t see any of the John Wick movies because he said to me, ‘I’m so proud of you, and I’m so happy for you. But we don’t see R movies anymore ever since I brought your grandma Helen to The Piano. Because if you remember that one, there’s a lot of Harvey Keitel in that. So I’ve got my Grandpa John Wick, Uncle John Wick, cousins John Wick. So the funniest thing is when they had to clear the title for legal [purposes], they were like, ‘Can you have your Grandpa sign this?’ And then the movie came out and they realize there’s like 11 John Wicks in my family.”
Normal will be released in theaters everywhere April 17.