Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk experienced a heart attack last summer while filming the sixth and final season of the show, seriously endangering his life. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, producer and co-creator Peter Gould discussed such tense situations and said that the production lacked a backup plan in case the worst happened.
Speaking with THR, Peter Gould revealed that there was no plan B for Better Call Saul after Bob Odenkirk’s heart attack. He explained:
There is no backup plan for your protagonist having a heart attack . It’s impossible. It reminds you that no matter how concerned and important entertainment is, and how much we all feel like it’s a matter of life and death while working on these shows and how much I always feel on the verge of being overwhelmed by a boulder, that’s not the case. It’s entertainment. When someone you care about goes down in front of everyone, everything changes. The miracle was that Bob returned after five weeks. And it was exactly the same as before, perhaps even a more generous hair.
I wasn’t there when he had the heart attack, but I was there the first day he got back. There was this emotional high in seeing him again . But there was also a lot of nervousness. “Should we be careful not to stress him too much?” Bob was ready to go, in fact, when he was still in the hospital, he would call me and say: “Maybe you should send me some scripts.” Naomi, his wife, in the background said, “Don’t send the scripts.” I don’t know if I answered the question about backup plans, but there may not be any. We weren’t going to do the series. We would have discarded everything
In an interview with the New York Times, Bob Odenkirk admitted that he had long been aware of his heart issues, which were brought on by a buildup of atherosclerotic plaques.
I’ve known I have a cardiac condition since 2018,” Odenkirk remarked. The doctors disagreed despite the fact that I saw two cardiologists at Cedars-Sinai and had coronary CT and MRI scans.
After receiving different advice from two different doctors on what to do, the actor followed the advice of the second professional, who said he did not need to start drugs immediately. Odenkirk said he was fine until then, when “one of those pieces of plaque broke.”
