Bob Odenkirk has revealed that he suffered a “little breakdown” during one of the final days of filming Better Call Saul and found himself unable to complete a scene.
The actor has portrayed the ethically dubious lawyer Saul Goodman for over a decade, on the hit AMC series Breaking Bad and as the lead of its ongoing spin-off, which recently finished filming its sixth and final season.
In an interview with The Guardian, Odenkirk described the emotion he felt about the series ending, and opened up about the near-death experience last year when a heart attack caused him to collapse on set.
Speaking a week before filming on Better Call Saul finally concluded, Odenkirk said: “The other day, I kind of had a little breakdown on the set, where I got pretty emotional.
“I couldn’t do the scene.”
The actor has previously claimed that Better Call Saul’s ending is set to be “a challenging way to go, to finish the series”.
“It’s not flashy,” he claimed earlier this month. “It’s substantial, and on some level, it’s things I hoped for, for years, in this character’s brain.”
Addressing his reaction to the heart attack, Odenkirk told The Guardian: “This might sound gross, but the thought I had was … Some people make their way through an experience like that and think: ‘I have to change my life, I have to stop whatever.’ And my thought was: ‘I have to keep going. This is great.’”
Better Call Saul returns to screens on 19 April 2022. The series airs on AMC in the US and is released in the UK on Netflix.