Peter Gould, co-creator of Better Call Saul, has spoken out about when the show’s star Bob Odenkirk suffered a heart attack during shooting.
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Odenkirk’s heart attack happened in July 2021, when he collapsed whilst on a break from filming the eighth episode of the show’s sixth and final season.
In an excerpt from Alan Sepinwall’s new book Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion To Better Call Saul, shared by Rolling Stone, Gould talked about the day of the star’s medical emergency, the aftermath, and what it could have meant for the show.
When asked about the days after the heart attack, Gould replied saying that he and the showrunners weren’t sure whether Better Call Saul would continue.
He said: “The doctors said [Odenkirk] needs to sit in a room lit by candlelight and he needs time to recover.
“Honest to God, we didn’t know if we were going to have a show or if we were going to finish it. And it felt so completely irrelevant, because it’s when you realise it’s just a fucking piece of entertainment.”
He continued: “We were ready to dump the whole thing. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about that. It’s too complicated. It was too big to really kind of think it through. But I’m sure somebody deep in the bowels of Sony had to start doing some calculations about what kind of loss they’d have to take, and thank God it didn’t happen.”
Thankfully, Odenkirk recovered and was able to return to shooting – without Gould and the writers having to adapt any of the scripts.
“We didn’t change a damn thing,” Gould said. “Writing-wise, we didn’t change a thing and we didn’t have to. If we had had something that was physically challenging, we would have had to figure out ways to shoot it so we would use more of a double.”
Instead, the crew were able to shift around the schedule to include more breaks for Odenkirk, and fewer consecutive intense days.
“Bob was the one, he’d always say, “Oh, I can stay. Let me stay. I can stay a little longer to finish this’,” Gould said. “But Melissa Bernstein and the rest of the producers just put the hammer down, and when the clock struck a certain hour, he turned back into a pumpkin and had to go home and relax.”
Odenkirk himself spoke out about the heart attack in 2022, saying that “If nobody had been there, I’d have been dead in a few minutes.”
Better Call Saul’s series finale aired as planned, and received acclaim from fans and critics alike. In NME’s episode recap, Samuel Moore said it had been worth the wait, and wrote: “Whereas Breaking Bad’s decision to let Walt go out on his own terms felt undeserved given all that had come before, Jimmy’s personal reckoning felt apt for a character that was always better than he allowed himself to be.”
Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion To Better Call Saul will be released on February 13.