I’m very earthbound,” says Bob Odenkirk, looking, for want of a better word, entirely normal. Gone are the garish off-the-rack suits he paraded as Breaking Bad’s unscrupulous shyster Saul Goodman; in their stead is a muted greyish sweater, as he perches on the edge of a chair in a Soho hotel room. “I’m a dad, I’m a husband, and I’m a guy who walks his dog a couple times a day. A guy who clumsily tries to make things. But within the qualifier of ‘normal’, there’s a pretty wide range of human behaviour,” he adds. “Which is to say... everybody should have a few aberrations.”
Here’s one aberration that marks Odenkirk out from the crowd: yelling. From his early days on HBO’s cult sketch comedy Mr Show, through to the life-and-death hijinks of Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, the 63-year-old has proved himself to be one of the best and funniest yellers on planet earth. There are entire compilations on YouTube simply of Bob Odenkirk yelling – everything from a slick, sleazy fury to a sort of emasculated, pyrrhic bellow. Today, unsurprisingly, there’s none of that. His Illinois lilt is muffled and a little scratchy, if anything.
