Bob Odenkirk previews Lucky Hank — and explains why Hank is easier to play than Saul

Bob Odenkirk is about to be an agent of chaos once again.

Instead of disrupting the legal field, though, he's bringing trouble to higher education in the AMC comedy-drama Lucky Hank. William Henry "Hank" Devereaux Jr. is a medium-key menace to those around him — as well as himself — as the chairman of the English department at a small Pennsylvania college. What kind of trouble? Well, he's certainly going to ruffle young, precious feathers in a writing seminar when he offers some tough love (minus the love) to one student's prose and refers to Railton College as "Mediocrity's capital."

Then it's off to the departmental offices to deal with the fallout and vex his colleagues, who include a pretentious, scheming poetry teacher (Suzanne Cryer) and a beleaguered dean (Oscar Nunez). Once at home, this long-constipated novelist is frustrating his wife (Mireille Enos), a high school vice principal who at least at one point had an endless reserve of grace for his antics, and twentysomething daughter (Olivia Scott Welch) who sees the world a little differently than him. Oh, and according to the trailer, he also may square off with a goose.

Based on Richard Russo's 1997 novel Straight Man, Lucky Hank marks the first TV gig for Odenkirk since he hung up his pinkie ring as slippery lawyer Saul Goodman on another AMC series, Better Call Saul last year. Before you follow the coming-of-middle-age crisis that is Odenkirk's latest incarnation, see what the master of reinvention himself has to say in this Q&A.

Sergei Bachlakov/AMC Bob Odenkirk on 'Lucky Hank'

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You began in comedy, then shifted into drama, and now you freely move about the cabin, between genres. This project feels notably different than Saul, and it tilts you back in the comedy direction, though not all the way back. I know how much you love throwing people and yourself for a curve — see: Nobody — but after Saul, were you specifically seeking to do something not just different, but a little lighter, too?

BOB ODENKIRK: Definitely. Saul was tough. Saul was so deeply emotional, so often. Either something as simple as fear, but a lot of regret carried that guy, and a lot of resentment drove him, and the inability to connect with anyone and certainly with Kim [Rhea Seehorn]. There really was so much turmoil, and that was hard. I mean, that just wears you down. So I really wanted something lighter. I was working on a project with David Cross [with whom he created and starred on Mr. Show] and my brother, Bill [Odenkirk, another Mr. Show writer], that was pretty much pure comedy. That didn't go. But that is for sure something I was looking for. And look, as you point out, this is just how I go: "What can I do that's fundamentally on the opposite side of the spectrum of stuff from what I just did, whatever that is?"

Tonally this is fundamentally different. All shows are different from each other, but it's just so fundamentally different from Saul, in that it's not genre — there's no guns, there's no drugs, the guy loves his wife, she loves him. They have a long-term relationship that feels real, feels complex, and a little broken, a little weak, but also a little strong [laughs]. He loves his daughter, but there's tension there. And he's funny. He makes jokes and he knows he's making jokes. So much of Saul was funny, but you were laughing at him, you know? This guy, he's more my age. And everything you're saying is what I thought. And I thought, "I'll do this show."

How and when did Lucky Hank enter your orbit?

I read this script before my heart attack. It might have been after — anyway, it was months before we finished Saul…. And this script had been written — I don't know, you'd have to ask the guys [co-showrunners Paul Lieberstein (The Office) and Aaron Zelman (Damages)], they wrote it years ago. And it was written as a half-hour…. I read it and I said, "This should be an hour, because if you're going to do a half-hour, you want to be painting with broader strokes, you know? Because you want to hit harder and run." [Laughs] And I felt like the emotions that were in the book — and also in the pilot that they wrote — just needed that time to make them real. You need to calm down a little and insist upon those things that the people are feeling, this deeper level and this level of subtlety, which is slightly more subtle than a lot of half-hour comedies are. We always reference Alexander Payne films. I've been thinking about the formula, and I think I've come up with this: 51 percent comedy, 49 percent drama.

That's so scientific of you.

I'm one of those few people who thinks it's okay to try to analyze comedy. [Laughs] I don't know what good it does you, but I don't think it's a crime. I know a lot of comics who hate the notion of taking comedy apart. And I just think you can do it. It's fun to do it!

If you were to make a word cloud to describe Lucky Hank, what words populate it?  

Shenanigans. Richard Russo talked about tenure, and he talked about the existential impact of tenure, and how because you have a job, because you can't get fired, because you won't be getting a raise, you are in this limbo place that initially feels great! But then pretty quickly you start to realize, "I can't prove my value anyway except competition with my other tenured professors. That's the only way I prove my value." You and I, we prove our value with our job — oftentimes with our salary, also somewhat with our title — but we're free agents every day that we're working and finding something useful to do. We feel meaningful. A tenured professor has to find that grip of meaning in the world by getting one over on their compatriots. [Laughs]

There's this internal intramural ego fight that I think he saw as a great place for human comedy. So that's why the word shenanigans works so well here, because to us on the outside, it's a little silly: "You guys aren't really all that angry about who's going to speak and who's going to introduce the guest speaker and who's going to win the silly award, or it doesn't matter that much, does it?" Or: "I got my article published in The Atlantic." "Well, mine's going to be published in The New Yorker." From outside their world, it looks like silliness, but it's not silly to them.

What was the element of Lucky Hank that most appealed to you?

You know what? I'm going to tell you, and you're going to maybe be surprised: He loves his wife and she loves him. That was the fundamentally different thing. And it made me think about Jimmy and Kim, because I always insisted — and we talked about it a lot — that they love each other. How do we make their relationship more dimensional and real? And people always wondered, "Did they sleep together? I don't know. Are they roommates?" [Laughs] I think that doing this show and reading this script, and now acting it out with Mireille, made me think how sad Kim and Jimmy were, and how maybe the only real reason they were together was they recognized the loneliness in the other person — and the degree to which each of them was such a loner. And maybe that's really all they shared. And that's just sad. [Laughs]

That's really, really sad.

I think it might be true. The way energy flows between you and your scene partner and the characters on the page, this feels more like they love each other, in the way that I recognize human beings caring for each other and loving each other. Jimmy and Kim, it was always like, "What is this relationship?" And the thing that got me was I related to this guy more. I related to his age, I related to his self-awareness, I related to the way he jokes about the world around him. And I related to his feelings of love and frustration. Everything about his relationship with his wife felt real to me and dimensional to me.

You claim to be cranky, but let's face it, you've become one of America's sweethearts. And you've said that Hank's misanthropic-yet-amicable nature also spoke to you.

For sure. I don't particularly go through life that way, but I have a lot of friends who do. And for him, he's joking all the time. And we talked about this at one point, me and Paul Lieberstein. And I said, "Well, some of [his] jokes are really funny and some of them aren't that funny." And we were like, "Look, we tried to make as many funny jokes as we could." [Laughs] I like that he's genuinely clever, genuinely funny. He's going to say the wisecrack comment, the first one that comes to his head, whether it's a great one or an okay one. Because it's an emotional response to life. It's a way to distance yourself from the moment, kind of put yourself above everyone else who's feeling or dealing with whatever's happening right in front of them. So he's not making the joke always because it's a great one. He's making a joke because he can't help himself. [Laughs]

In the pilot, we find Hank in the throes of a midlife crisis, or maybe it's just midlife misery. In your opinion, what is his major malfunction? Or is it a series of minor malfunctions?

This is my analysis. We all have chapters in our life. We get fired from a big job, or someone close to us dies, or we get a bad diagnosis, and we just start a new chapter. And this guy has been hanging out as an academic, with a certain degree of power in his department, and a certain amount of respect, because his first novel is respected, to some extent, among people who read it back then. Got a good review in The New York Times; it's forgotten.

He's been raising his daughter, but she's raised, she's married, she's out of the house. His dad — who he always has judged himself in relation to, who is maybe the most respected academic in this field — is retiring. And he didn't see it coming. Inside him, he's suddenly gaining awareness of, "The Earth is shifting under me. The new chapter has begun, whether I noticed it or not. My daughter doesn't need me. And my dad, who I've hated and resented and who's held this place in my heart and my mind, but also in the firmament of my field, my career, he's just going to disappear now. So I can't resent him anymore. No one will care that I resent him anymore. It doesn't mean anything that I resent him. He's gone." So Hank cracks.

Sergei Bachlakov/AMC Mireille Enos as Lily and Bob Odenkirk as Hank in 'Lucky Hank'

After being in a two-hander with Rhea for so long, which was a partnership that you thoroughly enjoyed, what was it like to jump into this potential new long-term onscreen partnership with Mireille? And what impressed you when you two first read together?

We didn't read together. The casting of this thing went so fast. We had a list of people who we were curious about to play Lily, and Mireille kind of popped out. She was very interested. But she was in New Jersey, I was in New York. I said, "Can we meet? No reading has to be done, I'm here. Let's have lunch." We met in Greenwich Village and we talked, and she was funny, and she was laughing and smiling. I had watched a bunch of the parts she's done over the last few years, and I said, "You have such a great smile! How come I've never seen it?" [Laughs] And she goes, "They don't let me play this side of my personality. I'm always getting chased. I'm always in trouble. I'm always worried and scared." And you see her in this, you see that smile, you see that warmth that she has. And that's genuine to her.

She was on board from then on, and I just think, dude, in the same way that Rhea just shone in Saul, and the more you watched, the more you went, "I think she is the best thing in this show." [Laughs] I am going to tell you something right now: I am very proud and pleased and honored to have been given this character and all this screen time, but if you watch the eight episodes, Mireille is going to outshine me — just like Rhea did. I'm not kidding! I just watched the eighth episode. The episode — I'm totally serious — it is almost an identical journey, as with Rhea and Kim. And she's f---ing amazing. The character that she starts with, and the degree to which it evolves, you're not going to believe how beautiful it is and how textured it is. It's f---ing top-notch. We have an amazing cast — I mean, how did I get so lucky?  When Saul ended, I was like, "We'll never be in a show this good again. We all know that. Or one where we love each other so much." But I'm telling you, absolutely I struck gold twice.

You played Saul over two shows for a dozen years. You're still on the awards-show circuit with that cast, but how challenging was it to finally shed that skin and say goodbye? Did moving on to this show so quickly make it easier?

I didn't think we would do it as quickly as we did. I would have preferred a break. But you can't say no when a network or a studio says, "We want the project that you want to make. We want it, but we want it right away. We need it for our schedule. We think it's right for us." And I think we're exactly in the right place [AMC] with this show.

Honestly, Saul beat the s--- out of me. [Laughs] The first year was so f---ing hard, man. I was like a basket case. I mean, the sheer number of lines I had. Being inside another person, and in Jimmy's case, so much of what drove him was negative things. He felt he wasn't given his due and he was resentful, so that resentment towards Chuck [Michael McKean] and everybody really was a big driver of him, and just living and wallowing in those negative emotions... In this case, this guy has processed more of that stuff, but his bigger issues are: He just hasn't noticed that the world has changed around him. He's got to recognize it and he's got to change, too.

The only thing that's hard is that he's pretty shut down. He's holding a lot of feelings deep inside him, but in the course of even the first eight episodes, he gets to work through many of them. I just related to him more and his intellectual approach to life. I mean, Saul was hard because Saul was so much younger than me. How old was that character at the end of that?

He turned 50 when he was on the run.

So he is 10 years younger than me, but really, emotionally, he felt like he was 25 years younger than me. This guy was easier to play. The hardest part is hitting the tone right on this show. When you don't have a genre tension to rely on: "Look, why is my character feeling this or doing this?" "Well, because a guy with a gun is chasing him." [Laughs] It simplifies things to have the motivations be as clear-cut and external as a genre piece gives you. And this show is more like real life. The things that are scary or chasing the different characters are oftentimes things that are internal and peculiar to that person. They're not a shared understood source of tension, like a drug cartel. So it's a challenging one to figure out.

Sergei Bachlakov/AMC Oscar Nunez as Dean Rose in 'Lucky Hank'

Oscar Nunez, who worked with Paul Lieberstein on The Office, plays the put-upon dean who has to manage Hank. What can viewers expect from that pairing?

It's really great, the degree to which Dean Rose and Hank have a friendliness, a tension. They've just been doing this for so many years together, and they get on each other's nerves. They bother each other, but they tolerate each other and there's even warmth there. And the complexity of that relationship is great to play. Oscar Nunez is so good at making a dimensional person come to life. There's just warmth in there, humanity in there. We had a great time working together and playing out this relationship of two guys who've known each other a long time and give each other s--- and are somewhat entertained by each other, even when they're driving each other crazy. [Laughs] It just felt very real — and that's what attracted me to the show.

Given that Paul brought in Oscar, is there a world in which a Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul actor will pop up here?

Oh, there you go! I get to use that: "Hey, you brought in Oscar!" I'd get Tony Dalton to come in.

That's the right answer. A comedy would be perfect for Tony. I'm surprised he hasn't been scooped up for one yet.

I'm with you. What would he be? Well, it's all English professors, right? He would be from the University of Mexico City.

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