How unlikely TV star Bob Odenkirk transferred his skills to become an action film hero in Nobody 2

West Australian

2 days ago

Bob Odenkirk entered the entertainment industry as a nobody, gradually worked his way up to 'somebody' status and, now, as a nobody again, has become Hollywood's unlikeliest action hero.
In the 2021 hit, Nobody, the 62-year-old played Hutch Mansell, a mild-mannered family man whose past as a former government assassin comes in handy when he's reluctantly drawn into a war with the Russian mob.
Odenkirk's performance was widely praised, coming after the actor had already won a legion of fans as the unscrupulous lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, earning six lead actor Emmy nominations in the process.
With Nobody 2 hitting Australian cinemas this week, Odenkirk says Hutch and Saul have some similarities.
'Somewhere around the third season of Better Call Saul I realised that they're watching this show all the way around the world,' Odenkirk says in an interview with The Sunday Times.
'And I thought, 'What can I do in the movies that could play for this audience'. And I realised Saul is hard working. He never quits. He's clever. He kind of gets knocked down, gets back up again. That's an action hero, except he's not fighting.
'I was willing to train to fight. I've enjoyed the training a lot, so it's sort of this weird, squiggly journey over into action.'
That training paid off in the first film, with one particularly memorable scene in which Odenkirk's Hutch dispatches a gaggle of gangsters onboard a bus.
When it comes to action sequences, it's a modern classic of the genre, which is no huge surprise given Nobody was written by Derek Kolstad and made under the auspices of David Leitch's 87North Productions, the brains behind the John Wick franchise.
But Odenkirk readily admits Hutch is no John Wick. He has a different action star in mind.
'He's more Jackie Chan than John Wick,' the actor says.
The comparison might have the uninitiated thinking Odenkirk veers into slapstick during his fights, but this isn't the case.
Yes, Hutch might bump his head or occasionally cop a blow that's intended to land with humour, but this isn't the broad comedy of a Jackie Chan film. The violence is, well, violent.
As someone who started out as a writer on Saturday Night Live, Odenkirk is a natural with the comic timing, and the rest requires visits to a stunt gym twice a week, which ramps to sessions every day when there's four months until the production starts.
The punishing training regimen is necessary to pull off the 11 distinct fight sequences in Nobody 2.
'It's hard, but it's good for you to exercise that much, but it is a lot,' Odenkirk admits.
'It's like doing two workout sessions a day, and that's fine for a couple days, but when you get into a couple weeks of it, it starts to really wear you down.
'I don't usually get hurt. We do a lot of stretching and preparation. I do oftentimes get bloody hands, because you swing your arms a lot and you'll hit your hand on something and that's the most injury I've gotten from these films.'
The sequel picks up the action a few years after the events of the first movie, with Hutch's family now fully aware of his former life as an assassin.
Wife Becca (Gladiator's Connie Nielsen) is becoming increasingly unhappy with her husband's extracurricular activities, so, like the dutiful family man he is, Hutch decides to take his brood on a road trip to a kitsch amusement park somewhere in Smalltown America.
It was the site of his happiest childhood memory, so imagine his frustration when Hutch finds the park now run by thugs in cahoots with an unhinged crime lord, played by the one and only Sharon Stone having the time of her life.
'I had met her at an awards show, the Golden Globes actually, and she seemed very nice, and she was complimentary to me,' Odenkirk recalls.
'I wrote her a note, and I said, 'Would you be willing to be a very big, broad character, because I didn't want her to come in and say, 'Hey, can we give it subtlety and can I play it more grounded'. No, not grounded. Big, broad, Bond villain level.'
Stone delivered, providing the ideal foil for Hutch, who somehow becomes even more relatable in Nobody 2.
'There's all these indignities that are very common, the kinds of things everyone suffers through in their daily life,' he explains.
'When you go on a vacation, you get the wrong hotel room. The water park is closed when you get there, and you drove for five hours in the heat. You're just worn down.'
So, when a local yokel in a video game arcade smacks Hutch's daughter, it's the perfect excuse to vent some of that frustration.
'It's the kind of thing in real life that could happen, but that you shouldn't respond to,' Odenkirk says.
'You shouldn't fight, but you want to. And, of course, Hutch is a guy who does fight ... and he comes back in that arcade and he punches that guy, and then he takes all the other security guys out.
'That's the beauty of Nobody 2, every dad can feel it.'
It's the sort of movie that makes you want to cheer out loud in the cinema. An underdog story that proves the old adage about the size of the dog in the fight being less important than the size of the fight in the dog.
And this underdog has a ton of fight. Odenkirk wouldn't have it any other way.
Nobody 2 is in cinemas now.