Bob Odenkirk Had Heart Attack Filming the Next Episode of Better Call Saul

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Better Call Saul Season 6 Part 2. The sixth and final season of Better Call Saul has been stress-inducing. First, double agent Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) died by suicide after being caught in the middle of the cat-and-mouse game between feuding drug lords Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton). Then, as Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and wife Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) plotted to ruin lawyer Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) and force a settlement in the Sandpiper case, their plan had unintended consequences when Lalo executed Howard in the Goodmans’ apartment. 

That’s only the first part of Season 6. In Part 2 of the Breaking Bad prequel, which returned with Monday’s midseason premiere “Point and Shoot,” Lalo terrorized the Goodmans before tying up a panicked Saul (née Jimmy McGill) as Howard’s corpse continued to bleed on the floor. 

But it was during the filming of “Fun and Games,” airing July 18 on AMC, that Odenkirk suffered a heart attack. Last July, the then 58-year-old actor collapsed on set in New Mexico and was rushed to the hospital, where Odenkirk recovered from what he referred to as a “small heart attack.”

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“I feel very good. I’m in great shape,” Odenkirk told THR ahead of Episode 609. “I didn’t go back to shoot for five weeks. I had a five-week break to recover. And then when I went back, we limited our shooting to 12-hour days… And so they took care of me and I was able to do it, and hopefully, you can’t tell when I had the heart attack and when I didn’t.”

He continued, “Next week is the scene where I have the heart attack. And probably about three-quarters of the scene was shot before I had the heart attack, the day of the heart attack, and then the other quarter scene was after.”

Odenkirk noted it was “strange” to watch the episode because he has “no memory of that day.”

“I’m really watching something that I don’t have any memory of acting in, which is a rare thing. I mean, usually you watch [something], and you have some recall of that even if it was shot months ago. But in this case, it’s such a complete blank,” he said. “It’s very strange. I gotta tell you, it’s a weird thing to have lost basically about a week and a half. Clean, just clean, clean nothing. That’s a strange experience anyway. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“Fun and Games” airs Monday, July 18. New episodes of Better Call Saul Season 6 premiere Mondays on AMC and AMC+.