SANDRA EBEJER: Why did you decide to write a memoir now?īOB ODENKIRK: I was reading a biography of a great actor, and I loved the book. Shondaland recently spoke with Odenkirk on a video call about why he thinks sketch comedy is a young person’s game and how he’s preparing for the end of Better Call Saul. “I want it to be a showbiz memoir about the business, about my way in and my journey through a business that is so quirky and offbeat and was such a foreign thing to me when I started.” “I don’t want this to be a life-story book,” the Illinois-born star tells Shondaland. Though the book touches on his personal life, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama is predominately about his storied career, specifically his never-ending pursuit of challenging work. In his new memoir, Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama, Odenkirk details his decades of work in the entertainment industry, sharing not only the highs but also the lows, including the many projects he created, wrote, and developed that went nowhere.

And, of course, he is Saul Goodman, the sleazy lawyer whom he’s played for 13 years on the hit AMC drama Breaking Bad and its spin-off, Better Call Saul.

Over the decades, Odenkirk has appeared in The Larry Sanders Show, How I Met Your Mother, Steven Spielberg’s The Post, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and the 2021 action film Nobody. It would take a dozen paragraphs to encapsulate everything the actor, writer, and director has accomplished, so here are the highlights: In the 1980s, while on the Saturday Night Live writing staff, he created the iconic character Matt Foley, the motivational speaker played by Chris Farley who “lives in a van down by the river.” In the ’90s, he and David Cross created, wrote, and starred in the cult HBO sketch series Mr. Anxiety Inspires ‘Veep’ Writer Georgia Pritchett.

Odenkirk memoir