Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”) earned a Tony nomination for his Broadway debut in the hit revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.” But almost 30 years ago, if he’d gotten his way, he would have starred in a very different production of David Mamet’s celebrated play.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
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“Back around ’97-’98, I wrote to David Mamet and asked him if I could do an all-comedy cast of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ with Fred Willard as Shelley Levine,” Odenkirk recalled on the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast. “I would be Ricky Roma, and David Cross and other people would be in it too. And I said: ‘Is it okay if we change it so that instead of selling land, the characters are selling pots and pans?’ He never wrote back.”
Odenkirk has wanted to do the show ever since. When asked why, he replied, “I can’t help but think about my roots. My dad, who was not a friend of mine, he would take me and my brother to his office occasionally, until I was about seven or eight years old. And we would go to lunch with him and his friends and they’d get drunk. They were all drunks. They all destroyed their businesses, ended up divorced. Most of them had car accidents. My dad would take us to lunch, and those guys were the guys in ‘Glengarry.’”
He continued, “So I don’t know, something about the play. You say, ‘Well, I thought you didn’t like your father. You want to get close to him or whatever?’ I don’t know, I guess I want to play those guys. I hung out with them occasionally, and I want to be one of those fuckers for a little while and live in their world. Live in their shoes. They’re very short-sighted people, and immature. But you know, so are most of us.”
Odenkirk got his start in sketch comedy, which is considerably looser and more improvisatory than the word-perfect clockwork of performing in a Mamet play. His approach to “Glengarry” ended up being an extension of how he worked on “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.”
“For ‘Breaking Bad,’ when I first got the script, I almost started marking up that first script, like: ‘Well, what if you said it this way? What if you shorten this?’ Like I’d been doing my whole life in comedy. And then I immediately thought, ‘You know what? I don’t think a real actor does that.’ I think a real actor goes: These are the words. What character do they describe, as scripted? Who is this guy if he talks like this, if he uses these phrases, if he repeats himself, if he backtracks? Who does that tell me he is?”
Also in the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Odenkirk expounded on the honor of being a Tony nominee — “to be invited in and embraced and given a nod here by this Broadway community, a community that you can see really knows each other, is pretty special” — and revealed why he was intimidated to tackle his first Broadway project.
“The truth is, this was very intimidating and I told myself it wasn’t,” he said. “I told myself this is no big deal. It’s just a stage. I’ve been on a million stages. But it was another level by a lot, and I didn’t prepare for it, anxiety-wise.”
But, he added, he’s grown to love it. “The audiences at a Broadway show come with the best fucking energy, and you get to work from that. It’s the best. So now I’m looking at other plays.”
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
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