At PaleyFest, the cast and co-creator Peter Gould teased what's ahead in season six as Odenkirk thanked fans for their support after the scary moment last summer: "That will resonate with me for the rest of my life."
On Saturday night, Better Call Saul made its final appearance at the annual Los Angeles TV showcase Palefest, as the AMC hit show is just days away from kicking off its sixth and final season. And for this concluding part of the episode, star Bob Odenkirk had just one request: development.
“I always wanted the character to grow and I campaigned for him for years. My argument to [co-creator] Vince Gilligan was that sometimes people learn the right lessons from trauma and challenge in life; They don't always become Walter White," Odenkirk told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet. "And I'm going to leave it up to you to find out if that happened."
Breaking Bad's prequel Better Call Saul follows Odenkirk's Jimmy McGill on his journey from small-time lawyer to powerful criminal lawyer Saul Goodman, who moves on to represent Bryan Cranston's Walter White. And, as revealed at the event, Cranston and Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman will return at some point in the final season.
After spending so many years with Saul between the two shows, co-creator and showrunner Peter Gould said that the finale's mission was to "find out what was the right place to drop him off, and I'm really excited to see what we do." Have brought it. I love it and I hope everyone else will like it too." And the decision as to where to leave her wasn't a plan of years gone by, but began to come together last season.
"We didn't know how we were going to wrap it up until season five, and if you look closely at season five, later you'll see the clouds start to run away during season five, and I won't say the end but We had an image where we could go,” said Gould. “As it worked, we came very close, but there were a lot of nuances that were hard won over this season.”
About reading those final scripts, Rhea Seehorn confirmed, "I couldn't believe all the story and character material weaving together that they had to do, as Peter has said, it was quite a Rubik's Cube called They had to understand. We were stunned. As an artist I think we found it alternately shocking and devastating and sometimes hilariously funny. It's ultimately very, very suggestive. I found it He's everything I want as a fan."
As for those last days on set, Odenkirk said that the fact that they're not coming back hasn't completely affected them yet, while Gould remembers being "incredibly emotional" as she played the series. Was directing the final episode the day it wrapped.
"We've been through near-death experiences, deaths in the family, births, marriages, divorces — it's been a ride with just about everything that can happen in human life," Gould said. "Slowly the group is scattered across the four winds, so it's a very long, slow, painful goodbye for the group, but I think as many of us are going to work together again as possible. Breaking After Bad I thought I'd never experience something as rewarding, fun, and creatively fertile as Breaking Bad, and for me the show has been as good, maybe a little better, for me.
Speaking of near-death experiences, Odenkirk suffered a heart attack last July while filming the series, which he and his co-stars — Jonathan Banks, Giancarlo Esposito, Patrick Fabian, Tony Dalton and Michael Mando — and Talked about - including minus Gilligan. In more detail during the PaleyFest panel.
He started thanking fans for their support online ("You treated me like I was a real angel, which blew my mind when I finally got my mind back") and told how they got that feeling. Doesn't remember much of the time, saying, "It was about eight days, eight and a half days where I have no memory. And then they came back little by little every day. ,
Banks declared, "Bobby was dead. Three times with [defibrillator] pedals," as Seehorn explained from his point of view the moment he and Fabian Odenkirk were 12 hours into filming.
"Thank god he likes us so much that he didn't go to his trailer because he wouldn't be here. He was with us and watching a Cubs game and it looked like he was about to pass out. He was going to faint and we realized that this thing was really more wrong and started screaming for help,” she said, as a set medicine, an AD with EMT training and a COVID- 19 The officer who was the first war medicine, came to his aid. "Patrick and I grabbed her and [producer] Melissa Bernstein called her family and they immediately got oxygen to her brain and worked on it until she came back."
Odenkirk said doctors have cleared the areas around her heart and she is now "in better shape than I've been in a while."
"I know we rank mostly on social media as a place of evil, but in this moment, in this chapter of my life, it was a place of incredible warmth and love and support and I can't believe it." ," They said. "It blew my mind and it still does and it will resonate with me for the rest of my life." And nine months later, he appears to have taken a lighter approach to the experience; When asked to describe the final season in a few words, Odenkirk said, "Heartbreaking."