Bob Odenkirk will soon be back on our screens for a final time as Slippin’ Jimmy McGill, AKA Saul Goodman, in the final season of Better Call Saul. But there was a dark period when we were unsure if Odenkirk would be able to finish filming the sixth and final season, due to him suffering a heart attack on set.
Fortunately, Odenkirk had recently played an unlikely action star in Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody, and had got into fighting shape through vigorous training for the role. Odenkirk credits his swift recovery following the heart attack to his Nobody training. In the action thriller, he plays a mild-mannered family man who, after his house is robbed, returns to his dangerous former life, making him the target of a vengeful drug lord.
Speaking to the New York Times, Odenkirk gave some more detail of the heart attack that occurred while filming Better Call Saul season 6; “We’d been shooting all day, and luckily I didn’t go back to my trailer. I went to play the Cubs game and to ride my workout bike, and I just went down. Rhea (Seehorn, who plays Kim Wexler) said I started turning bluish-gray right away.”
Now, speaking to the Howard Stern show, Odenkirk attributes his Nobody training as helping him both during the CPR and during recovery; “One of the things that saved me was I learned how to work out and because I was in good shape, you kind of enlarge some of the other veins around your heart if you work out a lot, and I had done that. As a result, I was told that more blood was able then to go to my heart during CPR, because these veins were just a little bit bigger from a lot of working out.”
“And so that helped me, but also, recovery wise, I recovered much faster than I think a normal person who wasn’t exercising so much would because my body was already in good shape.”
If you’re excited to find out how things turn out for Jimmy, Kim, Howard and the rest of the Better Call Saul crew, you might also be interested in the final seasons of Peaky Blinders and Ozark.