As fans of Better Call Saul may recall, the final season of the series was put in jeopardy after series star and four time Best Lead Actor Emmy nominee Bob Odenkirk suffered a heart attack on the set. Production on the series was suspended for a time while the actor recovered and with the final episodes in the can and set to premiere in July we know that the series will get its ending. In a new interview however, series co-creator Peter Gould revealed that at one point they considered scrapping the entire sixth season of the series if Odenkirk hadn’t recovered well enough to continue, or worse, passed away.
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“There’s no backup plan for your lead [having] a heart attack. That’s impossible,” Gould said in a round table with The Hollywood Reporter. “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….But there can be (no backup plan). We wouldn’t have had a show. We would’ve scrapped the whole thing.”
Gould revealed that in the aftermath of Odenkirk’s heart attack they stopped production for a bit, including giving everyone access to counseling to process it. He noted that they picked back up “pretty soon” afterwards however and began filming with other characters in scenes that didn’t require their title character. He adds:
“When we found out he was going to come back, we didn’t know what it would be like. I was not there when he had his heart attack, but I was there the first day back. There was this emotional high from seeing him again. 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.’”
The second half of Better Call Saul Season 6 premieres Monday, July 11 on AMC and AMC+.
