Bob Odenkirk Thinks ‘Some Version’ of Late Night Comedy Will Survive Streaming

Bob Odenkirk is aware that taking a punch to the face and being able to convincingly throw one in return onscreen is a little bit like doing comedy. Having gone through the learning process once for the former in 2021’s Nobody—a film for which Odenkirk spent more than a year training and preparing—the actor sees similarities between it and becoming a more seasoned late night comic. It’s all about practicing the rhythm and building confidence to deliver the punchline.

“I understood the basic rules of screen fighting, and I understood the language of it [after the first movie],” Odenkirk says when we catch up with him in Los Angeles. “I understood how the camera interacts. I learned so much on Nobody 1, and we put it to use on Nobody 2.” The star even reveals he never stopped training in the five years between filming Nobodys.

While honing one’s craft as a late-blooming action star is a new phenomenon for Odenkirk, it’s a concept he was intimately familiar with as a comedy writer turned star. After all, he cut his teeth in the world of late night as a writer on Saturday Night Live and then refined those dentures during the first season of Late Night with Conan O’Brien.  Afterward he channeled both experiences into HBO’s Mr. Show, a cult and critical favorite sketch comedy series that he co-created, produced, and starred in. Yet given the current financial realities (as well as perhaps political ones) that are taking Stephen Colbert off the air, it’s perhaps fair to wonder if that comedy-training pipeline which gave him, O’Brien, Colbert, and so many other opportunities is going away.

Perhaps. But Odenkirk seems optimistic about comedy’s prospects.

“I am not that worried,” Odenkirk says. “With the internet and with YouTube, and with all the streamers, there’s more comedy than there ever was, and there’s more platforms and opportunities than there ever was. They tend to pay less, but they pay something and there’s more of them. So that’s good. I think the biggest challenge is you could make a very good show now and almost nobody sees it because there’s just too much to sample.”

He adds, “The industry kind of does this journeying of expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting, so possibly we’re gonna contract a little bit, but I love how many platforms there are, and how much variety we can see.”

Odenkirk even thinks there is still room for a new iteration of the late night format in spite of all that variety, and all those streaming services applying pressure to the broadcast model.

Asserts Odenkirk, “Some version of late night will continue. It’s terrible what’s happened here with Colbert, but also I feel that I understand it. There are a lot of late night shows that are very similar to each other, and I can see how much is now online and a lot of my viewing is online, so I understand how it’s going through these changes. I’m okay with it. There’s gonna be lots of opportunity for us.”

With that said, Odenkirk does allow himself to be a little bit more nostalgic about his own experiences in comedy, late night and otherwise, than he has been in the past. As the creator of Chris Farley’s signature Matt Foley character, Odenkirk has admitted to a complicated relationship with SNL in the past. But when we caught up with the Nobody 2 star last week, he was quite open and maybe even a little wistful about attending the SNL 50 anniversary earlier this year.

“It was the greatest, that SNL 50 was so well done,” Odenkirk tells us. “Lorne Michaels really outdid himself, and just seeing all my old friends, Kevin Nealon and Dana Carvey and [David] Spade, and some of the writers. You know, everybody who worked on Saturday Night Live was invited to those events, so I got to see people who were in makeup and people who were in the front office and assistants. I haven’t seen those people in 35 years, you know? So it was really great.”

It was a chance to look back, even as Odenkirk is very much looking toward the future, including imagining a world how he might have many more adventures as Nobody’s Hutch Mansel.

Nobody 2 opens on Friday, Aug. 15. We’ll have more of our conversation with Odenkirk in the coming days.