From show creators Aaron Zelman and Paul Lieberstein, and adapted from the novel Straight Man by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo, the eight-episode dramedy series Lucky Hank follows Hank Devereaux Jr. (Bob Odenkirk), the chairman of the English department at Railton College in Pennsylvania. The seemingly ordinary man with an ordinary life and an ordinary career, with a wife (Mireille Enos) and daughter (Olivia Scott Welch) that he loves, also feels like he’s on the brink of a mid-life crisis that could erupt at any moment, possibly on his students or co-workers.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Odenkirk talked about what drew him to Lucky Hank, how it ended up happening so soon after Better Call Saul wrapped, the tricky balance in finding the tone and humor of the show, how he views this character versus how the character views himself, what it’s like to tell a story that’s just about human relationships, and that he likes to both take risks and find variety in his work.

Collider: After you do TV series the quality of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, that must raise the bar so high when it comes to considering any TV projects after that. Were you even thinking about doing another TV series so soon? Did you think that you would actually take a break, after the final season of Better Call Saul?

BOB ODENKIRK: I read this six months to a year before Saul ended, and I liked it. There was so much that I liked about it, so I said I would do this show. Saul had not even ended. As far as doing it so quickly after, I just didn’t think it would go that quickly. I thought there would be a year after Saul before we’d take a run at this. But what happened was, because I said yes to it before we even finished Saul, and it was months before, that gave them time to make the deals and pursue it and ask if they wanted to make it and talk to the writers about it. It became more of a real thing, long before that show even ended. And I hadn’t had my heart attack yet. So, it gave that cushion of time that allowed this to happen pretty quickly after. I still didn’t think it would happen so quickly, but I had already said yes to it, so I was fine with it.

As far as the quality thing goes, you have to take into account something that is often missed when we think about things in the past. In retrospect, nobody knew that Breaking Bad was gonna be the great juggernaut of excellence, that it was. It was just a script. It was kind of crazy. In fact, when I joined it at the end of the second season, it still was almost canceled. It was not a world beater yet. Mad Men had far surpassed it in cultural import, at that point. And Better Call Saul was such a risk. It was a human humongous risk. We knew we wanted it to be different from Breaking Bad, but we didn’t know how, or the way it would play out. I’m up for risk. Trying to be the lead in an action movie (Nobody) shows that. To me, part of the joy of being in this business is to take that leap with a bunch of other people off a cliff and hope that we land somewhere safe.

The things that I liked about this project were the character was funny and he knew he was funny, as opposed to Saul. Saul is funny, but you laugh at him, you don’t laugh with him so much. This guy was making jokes, all the time. I loved getting to play that. I love getting to play a guy who was closer to me in age. One of the hardest things about playing Saul was that he was naive about himself and about life in ways that I think you should wise up to, by the time you’re 40 years old. I think he was in his thirties for most of that show, and I’m 60 now, so that was a stretcher for me. But I love this guy, Hank Devereaux Jr., because he loves his wife and she loves him, and he loves his daughter, even though she’s annoyed by him. It was a person and a world and a universe that I could relate to and that was just very refreshing, after the loneliness of Jimmy McGill’s world.

Bob Odenkirk as Hank Deveraux Jr. in Lucky Hank
Image via AMC

Now that you’ve closed the door on Saul, did leaving him behind make you more emotional or was it more impactful on you personally than you expected?

ODENKIRK: No, the most impactful thing was saying goodbye to the cast. The thing that hurts my heart is having the camaraderie and the love and friendship with Rhea Seehorn and Patrick Fabian and Michael Mando and John Banks and Giancarlo Esposito be in my past. That was the hardest thing about moving on from that show. Nothing comes close to that. The character was an incredible gift to me, career wise and challenge wise, but being inside that guy, who was lonely and had fairly immature behavior, was hard after a while. I’m fine with walking away from that.

I love that you’re showrunners for Lucky Hank have done The Office and Bloodline because, even though those shows couldn’t be more different, the combination of those two things feels perfect for this show, which is fairly serious at times and a little melancholy sometimes, but it still made me laugh out loud more than once. Did you have conversations about the tone and the humor of this show, and finding the right balance?

ODENKIRK: Very much so. Absolutely. That was the top conversation when we started, and when we finished. It was the running through line of our conversation. You nailed it look. Aaron [Zelman] comes from a totally different place than Paul [Lieberstein] comes from, and then I come from a mix of all of that. This show, to me, is 50/50 drama and comedy, which is really hard to do and rarely done. I feel like Alexander Payne does it wonderfully, but outside of him, I don’t know who does it so well. It’s a tough thing to do because you’re either pulling back on the comedy too far, or your drama isn’t authentic because the comedy is ridiculing the drama. We’re trying to do a very hard thing. We’re a super team, if ever there was one, because of how we come from such different veins of performance and writing. Maybe we made it work. I’ll leave it to you to decide that. But we knew it was a challenge from the start, and we talked about it all the time.

One of the things that I love about the show is that the comedy and the drama often come at unexpected times.

ODENKIRK: Yes, and we kept that up through the whole series. It’s funny that you point that out because there’s something in episode five, where it’s an incredibly painful scene that we’re doing just pure drama, and Paul Lieberstein asked me to do a really silly thing right in the middle of the saddest, hardest scene in the whole series. We did it, and it’s in the show, and it’s really fun. It’s a risk. It’s a challenging thing, but it’s incredibly entertaining, if you can pull it off. When I talk to people about the tone of the show, I like to mention the movie Sideways, and the number of people who love Sideways, it’s like the movie Nobody, where everybody loved it, whether they’re old men or young women. When you get that right, everybody enjoys it, and hopefully we got it right, or at least right enough, to carry on making it.

Bob Odenkirk as Hank Deveraux Jr. and Mireille Enos as Lily Deveraux in Lucky Hank
Image via AMC

This is such an interesting character because he’s a bit reluctant, he’s kind of ambivalent, and he can be crabby, but he’s also quite funny and you can see that he loves his family. How do you view him, and how do you think that compares to how he views himself?

ODENKIRK: I view him as everything you just said. His persona, like all of ours, is a bit of a construct by himself. He knows he’s the funny guy. He knows he’s the jokey guy. He knows that he doesn’t have to give an honest answer because he’s been giving these wisecracks his whole life and people allow him to do it. He gets to hide behind his wisecracks and jokes. On some level, he’s expressing himself honestly. He does look at the world through a joke lens. He thinks it’s a funny place and that people are ridiculous, but he is hiding a bit. He’s gonna have his persona wrested from his tight grasp, over the course of this season. So, how does he perceive it? He perceives himself as quite a delightful character. We’ll just see how far that takes him, as the world around him shifts.

This is not a high concept show. You’ve talked about how this is a show that has no zombies, no drugs, and no guns. It’s a show about humans and their relationships. What’s it like to tell a story like that, in a world that’s filled with superheroes and zombies, and all of these crazy things?

ODENKIRK: It’s risky. I think it’ll feel refreshing to people. I don’t think there’s gonna be a whole lot they can compare it to, that’s on TV right now. It might be a great reprieve from all those other shows, where there’s no question what the stakes are because somebody’s waving a gun around. I love the idea that we took a run at this and that we’re exploring this world that’s closer to the stakes of real life, which are the stakes of your ego, the stakes of status, and the stakes of how you matter to your wife or husband and your kids. It’s a risk, is what it is. There’s no place that this show could exist or live than AMC. With Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and Mad Men, AMC has established itself as a place where the character matters more than the stakes. The stakes can be high, like in the case of Breaking Bad and certain scenes in Better Call Saul, but in general, what you’re watching is character. You’re watching people who are closely observed and that are rich, complicated human beings. That’s what you’re watching for. That’s why you’re watching the show. There really is no place you could live, so I’m glad we’re there. The truth is, when you put something up in the wrong place, you’re doomed.

Bob Odenkirk as Hank Deveraux Jr. in Lucky Hank
Image via AMC

Are you the type of actor that has a wish list of types of projects you’d like to do, characters you’d like to play, and people you’d like to work with, or are you more the type of actor that likes to see what comes your way, at any given point?

ODENKIRK: I’m more the type of actor who likes to see what comes my way. I’m not gunning for any awards. I’m not gunning for any place or respect, or something that I saw as a kid, or wanting to duplicate or replicate someone else’s career. But what I do look for is variety in dynamic range. To go from Saul to this, to me, is a big straddle. And to go from Mr. Show to an action movie is a big straddle. That’s what I’m trying to do, and I’m always trying to do that with my next project. So, I think I’m due for a pure comedy, something more like Mr. Show. That’s what I’d like to see me do next. And of course, I’d like to do more action because I did enjoy making that movie, a lot more than I thought I would. The actual work of making it was a lot of fun. I loved doing the action sequences. So, that’s what I’m always looking for. If you’ve seen my memoir, I express that Mr. Show was so satisfying to me. It was everything that I dreamed of getting to do on television. So, once Mr. Show was done, my bucket list was empty. It’s really true. Now, I just go project to project, and I look for something that feels it goes to another place from what I just did. This part felt so fundamentally different from Saul because he was in on the joke of who he was, he was aware of the persona that he’d constructed, and he had connection to people in his world. That was just very different from Saul, to me.

One of the things that I just really love about your work, as an actor, is that you seem like you just enjoy the heck out of what you’re doing. And even if the viewer can’t necessarily put their finger on that while they’re watching you, it comes across. I think that that’s what makes the characters you play so interesting to watch. It just seems like you’re enjoying yourself, doing it.

ODENKIRK: Yeah, I am. I’m picking parts that will make me really smile that I pulled it off. I’m always trying to do something unexpected and pull it off, and sometimes it works.

Lucky Hank airs on Sunday nights on AMC.