Bob Odenkirk is reflecting on his near-fatal heart attack five years later.
“I went down and Rhea [Seehorn] and Patrick [Fabian] grabbed me and they were screaming, but [the crew members who noticed] thought they were laughing,” Odenkirk, 63, told the Times of London in a Friday, May 13, profile, recalling his health scare. “So there were delays in reacting because we were all so far apart from each other.”
He continued, “I was gone. I turned grey. Eventually the on-set medic showed up and he didn’t know what to do. He’d never done CPR.”
Odenkirk collapsed while filming the final season of AMC’s Better Call Saul in July 2021 and was transported to a local hospital for treatment. It was later revealed that the actor suffered a small heart attack, which doctors were able to treat without surgery.
Odenkirk also suffered from memory loss, telling The Times he only knows about the incident from third-party witness accounts.
“A lot of people get that wonderful reel of film of their life, or they have a person who says, ‘Do you want to go back?’ None of that for me,” Odenkirk told the outlet. “The first memory I have is leaving the hospital a week after I got there.”
Now, the Breaking Bad alum is grateful and appreciative of his health.
“That was such a gift, to experience a few weeks where I felt that way about my presence in the world,” he stated. “I felt just very, very delighted and engaged.”
Odenkirk has previously been candid about his cardiac recovery.
“Weirdly, it didn’t affect me much for a long time. I had a strange kind of upbeat energy literally the next day, and every day,” he told Yahoo!Life in October 2023. “It was because I had, like, a mind wipe every night. My ability to even think about what had happened to me [was compromised] — I needed to hear about it from people who’d been there, and I needed my brain to get back on a normal state. It’s something I think about every day.”
Odenkirk initially broke his silence on the health scare one year earlier, revealing on Sunday Today that the incident was “deadly serious.”
“My widow-maker artery was completely blocked,” Odenkirk recalled on a 2022 broadcast. “That’s why it’s called the widow-maker ’cause you die when that happens, but I went down.”
According to Odenkirk, his Better Call Saul costars were also shaken by his collapse.
“I was not present for any of it,” he said at the time. “I’m told it was a pretty shocking day on set, and traumatizing for all my costars and crew members and people I love very much who love me and stood by my side and then went to the hospital with me.”
