Gilligan himself was on hand to direct, adding to the last-hurrah ambience: “We have to be out of here tonight,” Gilligan told me in the garage, eating a slice of pizza from the catering truck before darting back inside, “so there’s a little time pressure.” Odenkirk, who’d recently turned 59, was here to shoot a scene from an episode that will air later this year during the show’s sixth and final season. Crew members huddled in winter coats, and production vehicles sat humming up and down the block. It was a punishingly cold evening, which seemed even colder thanks to a scattering of fake snow arranged outside the house. My first glimpse of Odenkirk came via a pair of monitors wedged into the open garage of a suburban home, on the northeast side of town. He also didn’t bother to memorize the reams of cascading, hucksterish dialogue that the writer Peter Gould had crafted for him, certain that these lines would be cut way down by the time he stepped on set. “I didn’t even watch a whole episode, but I didn’t need to, I got it,” Odenkirk recalled. So when the offer came in 2009, he flew from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, watching “Breaking Bad” - about a mild-mannered New Mexico chemistry teacher named Walter White who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and, in the midlife crisis that ensues, becomes a coldly calculating meth kingpin - for the first time on the plane. When it ended after four seasons, Odenkirk tried directing feature films with decidedly mixed results, failed to get a litany of other projects off the ground and turned to mentoring younger talents whose love of sketch comedy matched his own. Show,” a cult hit that he created for HBO in 1995 with his friend David Cross. He had a hand in writing sketches that helped define the ’90s era of “Saturday Night Live.” He acted on “The Larry Sanders Show” (excellent and underseen), wrote for “Get a Life” (excellent and canceled swiftly) and did both for “The Ben Stiller Show” (excellent and canceled even more swiftly) and for one of the all-time-great American sketch series, “Mr. He studied improv under the visionary teacher Del Close and performed for packed crowds at Second City alongside buddies like Chris Farley. Odenkirk’s pedigree was in comedy, where he enjoyed a paradoxical status: legendary and obscure. He was in no position to turn down good work - even if it was a minor role, intended to last only a few episodes. When Bob Odenkirk’s agent first called him about playing an oily bus-stop-ad lawyer named Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” - at the time a little-watched cable show in production on its second season - Odenkirk hadn’t seen a minute of it, much less heard about it. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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