Justin Yopp

Bob Odenkirk reveals how a cameraman's joke accidentally inspired Better Call Saul. "The first scene that I did in Breaking Bad when Saul has Walter White in his office somewhere after half an hour, 40 minutes of shooting, the director yelled cut. And one of the cameramen said, Can I get a job on the sequel? And everyone laughed because I guess everyone was thinking this character is pretty great, pretty fun to see." "From that point on, it was a joke that are they going to make a sequel with Saul? And every year, one time a year, Vince Gilligan would pull me aside somewhere and say, what do you think about that? Do you think there could be a show in Saul? And every time he'd ask me, I'd say, I have no idea. Only you know that. And if you want to write that, I'll do it." "It really wasn't until the finale of Breaking Bad, I want to say a year after that Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, who wrote the first episode that featured Saul, called Better Call Saul, they took me to a lunch at the Chateau Marmont, famous Hollywood place, and said, We're thinking about creating that show, and what do you think?" "I said, First of all, you're going to have to make him likable. Saul isn't sort of fun on his own. He's fun in the context of Breaking Bad. And the other thing I said to them was, and don't forget I'm 50 years old. So, you know, please don't write him as a 30-year-old cause I'm not 30. And of course, then they went and wrote him as like 30. So, yeah. You know, they had to CGI the bags from under my eyes in like three scenes on Better Call Saul."