Peter Gould, co-creator and showrunner of AMC's Better Call Saul, revealed that he had "no backup plans" for the series had star Bob Odenkirk not recovered from his heart attack in 2021.
"There's no backup plan for your lead [having] a heart attack," Gould explained during a roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "That's impossible. It reminds you that as preoccupied and as important as entertainment feels -- and we all feel like it's life-and-death as we're working on these shows; I always feel like I'm on the verge of getting crushed by a boulder -- it's not. It's a piece of entertainment. When someone who you care about goes down that way in front of everybody, it changes everything. The miracle was that Bob came back after five weeks. And he was exactly the same guy -- maybe even a hair more generous."
Gould continued, "I was not there when [Odenkirk] had his heart attack, but I was there the first day back. There was this emotional high from seeing him again," he explained. "But also, there was this edginess. 'Are we going to have to be careful of pushing him too hard?' Bob was all ready to go. In fact, when he was still in the hospital, he was calling me and saying, 'Maybe you should send me some scripts.' Naomi, his wife, was in the background saying, 'Don't send scripts.' I don't know if I've answered the question about backup plans, but there can be none. We wouldn't have had a show. We would've scrapped the whole thing."
In July 2021, during the filming of the Breaking Bad prequel's sixth and final season, Odenkirk collapsed on set from a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital for treatment. The actor, who plays Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill in the series, took an extended hiatus from filming during his recovery. "We were shooting a scene, we'd been shooting all day, and luckily I didn't go back to my trailer," Odenkirk said in a February interview about the incident. "I went to play the Cubs game and ride my workout bike, and I just went down. Rhea [Seehorn] said I started turning bluish-gray right away."
On the subject of Better Call Saul's sixth season, which aired its acclaimed mid-season finale in May, Odenkirk also recently revealed what fans can expect from the show's conclusion. "It's not flashy," he said. "It's substantial, and on some level, it's things I [had] hoped for, for years, in this character's brain. But what I like about it is, it's not cheap. It's not easy. It doesn't feel cartoonish. It's pretty great, I think. It's pretty great."
The final season of Better Call Saul returns to AMC and AMC+ on July 11.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
