Bob chats with Time Out New York about his character, recalling his time on Breaking Bad and more. See below for an excerpt and for the complete interview, visit TimeOut.com.
Were you surprised Saul didn’t die in Breaking Bad?
I was surprised every time I read the script. He did seem like a perfect character to kill. You can’t kill Jesse, and you can’t kill Walt. But you do have to occasionally kill an important character just to keep the stakes high for everyone. So I was looking for that. Bryan Cranston said Saul was like a cockroach and he was gonna crawl out at the end.
Saul has so many great lines in that show. Do you have any favorites?
What is the one about the Beatles? Oh, yeah, the one where I say, “Paul, Ringo. Ringo, Paul. Congratulations, you’re the cute one now.” I mean, it’s kind of mean to Ringo Starr.
Well, Ringo sometimes deserves some ribbing. Have you seen his paintings?
Wait a second. Are they bad?
Yeah. Really bad.
[Looks them up on the Internet] Oh, come on, man! Goddamn it. Totally insane. It’s like an old woman who lives in a trailer made those paintings. Not good. I think, you know, he probably looked at Keith Haring’s work and thought, Oh, my stuff’s kind of like that.
In Better Call Saul, we learn that your character is actually named Jimmy McGill and is from Cicero, just outside of Chicago. You’re from around there. Was his hometown your idea?
I did tell [showrunners] Vince [Gilligan] and Peter [Gould], I think this guy’s from Chicago. I mean, it makes sense. If you love Chicago and you’ve read Mike Royko’s book Boss, you know what went on there and what still goes on there, which is a lot of backroom dealing—the perfect place for that character to be from.
Did you witness any shady dealings firsthand?
There was this stand-up gig on Sunday nights in Cicero where you could make like 40 bucks. It was at a disco. I think it was called Up All Night, and it was clearly a Mafia laundering place. There’d be like 20 people there. It even started at 1am…on a Sunday night. There was no audience. You would get up on the dance floor, which was empty, and tell jokes, and then these guys would barely look at you over their shoulder. These guys who were muscle guys, for people who need muscle. It was sketchy.
Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 10pm on AMC.