Nobody 2: Bob Odenkirk and Connie Nielsen Reveal Their Real-Life Vacation Nightmares

When making the first Nobody back in the pre-COVID days of 2019, Bob Odenkirk refused to let himself think about the project as the start of a potential action franchise. Despite spending more than a year training for the gig, he viewed it first and foremost as a creative gamble. Even so, he confides to us during a recent sit-down interview in a couple of lawn chairs that he never stopped going to the gym or hitting the punching bag in all the years between Nobody 1 and Nobody 2. That includes the pandemic years between production and release.

“I did train hard and I kept up the training between the films,” Odenkirk reveals to us. “I didn’t stop, even though we of course had no idea how well Nobody 1 would do.” To maintain that regimen during delays hints at steely dedication. It also confirms Odenkirk’s instincts on how to approach a late-career pivot into action cinema.

“I felt that in the first one, one of the things I did right was I didn’t play it off as comic,” the former Mr. Show star explains. “I went full throttle, angry, rageful, and bloody. And so obviously people could’ve either rejected me entirely and say, ‘You suck and don’t do it again,’ or what we got, which is ‘okay, you’re really doing this. Alright, pretty good.’”

Odenkirk is visibly proud of the first movie and the choices made, including with the film’s final scene stinger, which Odenkirk also reveals was filmed and inserted long after principal photography at the studio’s insistence. It’s the scene that sets up the actual sequel: some nondescript months after the rest of the movie’s events,  Odenkirk’s assassin-turned-suburban dad of a certain age, Hutch Mansell, and his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) are seen shopping for a new house. The twist is that Becca seems to have condoned Hutch’s murderous instincts since she asks if the house has a basement (the location of his deadly man cave in the first film). It clearly sets up another movie, but Odenkirk appreciates it to this day for other reasons.

“What I liked about the basement line at the end of Nobody 1 by Becca is it suggests that the wife fully knows what her husband does, and it makes you ask who is she?” Odenkirk teases.

That question becomes a major thematic tension in this weekend’s Nobody 2. In the new movie, Becca has made peace with Hutch’s past, although he is so deeply back in the assassin game that she is eager to take their family on a much needed vacation. But this being a Nobody and 87North Productions release, things don’t go as planned—and it turns out Hutch’s beloved small town amusement park vacation from his own childhood has actually long been a front for a deadly criminal syndicate! Through it all, however, remains the enigmatic relationship between Hutch and Becca.

“It’s funny when you look at parents, we don’t see real people,” Nielsen muses in our own makeshift backyard interview. She also makes note of an enigmatic scene in Nobody 2 where Becca is revealed to be a damn fine shot in their run-down amusement park’s shooting gallery.  “We see Mom and Dad. These are confections that we have invented for our children. To our children, we don’t do [the things] we actually do. We are just Mom and Dad. And that is the conceit we are also playing on in the film. When my son comments on what a good shot I am, I make a total poker face and go like ‘really?’”

Nielsen similarly hints that she and Odenkirk have extensively discussed Becca and Hutch’s backstory, which is only beginning to be filled in by Nobody 2. However, when asked if she can reveal any details, she cryptically smiles “absolutely not.”

The relationship between Becca and Hutch is the emotional linchpin of both Nobody films, but the reason they work is the surreal quirk of seeing an everyman dad—like Odenkirk appears on the outside—go lethal in mundane situations. Take for instance, a vacation that doesn’t exactly pan out in the fictional town of Plummerville, the amusement destination that was a lot grander in Dad’s memory. It’s an idea Odenkirk can relate to since, as he tells it, he only had two vacations in his entire childhood, and one of them was to the several water parks and tourist attractions in the city of Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.

“It is essentially Plummerville, especially when I did it 45 or 50 years ago,” Odenkirk laughs. “It’s a much bigger town now and it’s more impressive, but also I took my kids on vacation there. And if you’re a parent and you take your kids on vacation, one of the things you can’t help but find is that it’s frustrating and challenging. It’s more relaxing to stay home!”

While Odenkirk makes comparisons to Wisconsin Dells and the fictional Plummerville in Nobody 2, he also notes he had a better time going back than Hutch did.

“Luckily when I brought my kids to the Dells, and I did, they were still young,” says Odenkirk. “They were six and eight. They were very impressed by it. But in this case, Hutch brings his teenage kids to the place that he liked when he was eight. Which they’re not impressed by.”

Nevertheless, the trials and tribulations of travel remain timeless. Nielsen even considers it an inevitable certainty that what you found awe-inspiring as a child will not hold up as a parent.

“This thing that was so magical and amazing when you were a kid, and then you go there and you realize what was super tall at the time, is not tall at all, and what was magical is kind of dinky. You can’t go back. That terrible and true thing, you want to go back and have that same experience again, but you never can because the river has moved on. It’s no longer the same.”

Still when it comes to her own personal experiences with a holiday that went wrong, the Gladiator actor is quickly able to conjure a vivid childhood memory from her time growing up in Denmark.

“We all got caught at one point as children in a pool that was making waves,” Nielsen recalls of a traumatizing event for her and her two siblings, “and this was at a time when I don’t think any of us had ever seen one. All of a sudden my Mom has three kids in a pool where the waves are huge and she has to get three kids out from the middle of that. And I still remember it so vividly. I literally thought I was going to die.”

While not Sharon Stone and a truck-full of goons, it’s the type of holiday ordeal that Nobody 2 has some fun with while keeping up with the Mantells. Whether we’ll see more of Hutch and Becca after Nobody 2 remains to be seen, however Nielsen at least volunteers one intriguing idea for a Nobody 3…

“Bob is going to kill me, but I’ve told him I’d really like us to go to Italy,” Nielsen says. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but it’s where we first met, that I can say, because we are alluding to it in Nobody 2.”

Nobody 2 is in theaters on Friday, Aug. 15.