Bob Odenkirk's New Action Movie Nearly Cut One Of Its Funniest Jokes From A Brutal Fight Scene

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Bob Odenkirk's Ulysses looking intense and aiming a grenade launcher while standing in front of two people in Normal

Published Mar 18, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT

Bob Odenkirk is back for another round of action and hilarity with Normal, though almost missed out on delivering one of the film's funniest jokes.

The two-time Emmy winner leads the new action movie as Ulysses, a man given a provisional position as sheriff for the titular Midwest US town in the wake of their sheriff's death. Initially won over by the generally quiet goings-on in Normal, particularly as he is reeling from a falling out in his marriage and hardships in his prior position, Ulysses is suddenly thrust into action when an attempted bank robbery unveils a web of secrets tied to the town's criminal underground.

Alongside Odenkirk, the film's ensemble cast includes sitcom icon Henry Winkler, Game of Thrones alum Lena Headey, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever's Reena Jolly, Shoresy's Ryan Allen, Nobody's Billy MacLellan and Violent Night's Brendan Fletcher, among others. Helmed by Ben Wheatley on a script from John Wick and Nobody creator Derek Kolstad, Normal has garnered largely positive reviews from critics since its 2025 Toronto International Film Festival premiere, currently holding an 82% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

In honor of its latest festival premiere, ScreenRant's Ash Crossan interviewed Bob Odenkirk, Ben Wheatley, Derek Kolstad and Marc Provissiero in our SXSW media suite to discuss Normal. Reflecting on the movie's various fight scenes, the group turned to a sequence in which Odenkirk's Ulysses fights an enemy in a kitchen, which required them to use a very real kitchen in a diner due to not having the budget to build a "soft set" for the actors to fight in.

While the tight quarters amplified the stakes of the scene, it also led to one of Normal's funniest jokes, in which Odenkirk's Ulysses slips and falls on a head of cabbage in the middle of the fight. Both the Emmy winner and Kolstad revealed that to be a genuine accident on the former's behalf, to which the writer/producer chuckled as he said they "kept it in because it's great," while Odenkirk recalls being scared they almost weren't going to have footage of the bit entirely:

Bob Odenkirk: When I slipped, and then I got up to carry on with the fight, in my mind I was like, "Please don't say cut because I slipped." I was desperately afraid that either they would say cut or just cut. Like, the cameraman would drop his camera, because the guy slipped. I was like, "That's great. That's perfect." Because that's the kind of action character I can do is a fallible one, who will slip and fall and hurt himself. So, I was thrilled when that happened. And, in the moment, I was like, "This is f----ng great. Keep going, keep going."

One Fight Scene Turned Out More Physical Than The Normal Team Intended

ScreenRant: Well, who wants to take the reins on telling us what the premise is and just how the idea came to be?

Derek Kolstad: Yeah, I'm one of those writers who loves to write and just had an idea one night that was based on my love of certain movies from the '60s, like Bad Day at Black Rock, and just the classic Hitchcock [idea] of, "Nothing is what it seems." So, I built out in one evening an 11-page treatment, and we had talked about it for years, but we never had the bandwidth. And when we did, Bob and I tackled the story and the script. But in essence, you have a guy who is a substitute sheriff — a sheriff of a town, dies, gets sick, or somebody retires. Homeland Security just sends in this guy — all made up, by the way.

ScreenRant: I was like, I didn't know that sheriffs had temps.

Derek Kolstad: Works for the movie. And of course, he comes to a small town where there's a secret, and they're all keeping him from him. Just as it looks like smooth sailing, in regards to keeping a secret from him, there's a robbery and it blows up.

ScreenRant: And what is all the history here? Have y'all worked together before?

Ben Wheatley: No, I'm the new kid.

ScreenRant: You're the new kid. Are they hazing you?

Ben Wheatley: There was a bit of that. [Chuckles] You just have to have fortitude, and not let it get to you, and then you're fine.

ScreenRant: I love seeing Bob going bonkers, it's my favorite new genre.

Bob Odenkirk's Sheriff Ulysses holding a walkie talkie looking worried in Normal Vertical-1

Bob Odenkirk: I like going bonkers. I had a lot of fun doing action sequences. I was very surprised by how much fun I had in Nobody. I mean, I was excited to do it. Of course, it took years of work and preparation, and yet I was still surprised by how much fun it was to make action sequences, how much we laughed when we were doing the bus scene. And that's just carried on. When you're doing an action sequence, you choreograph it and plan it, and that's fun. And then you train for it, and that's actually pretty fun too. But then when you're on set actually shooting it, inevitably, things are not exactly the way you had planned it to be. There's always something that's physically different about the space than the rehearsal space, even though you map it out at the rehearsal space, or there's a move that you do that doesn't look great on camera, and because of the confines of wherever you're fighting, oftentimes. Then, you have to invent something, or you just think of something fun to do that you didn't think of before, because you weren't in this location with this lighting and these props. So, my discovery on Nobody was that this was as much fun as I had writing sketch comedy. In fact, I remember in the bus thinking the last time I felt this way was being in a room full of sketch comedy writers laughing and inventing scenes. So, that has carried over, and in the movie Normal, there are fights, like the hardware store, and the yarn shop, and certainly the kitchen, unquestionably, that have as much inventiveness and discovery and laughter. There's a lot of laughter on an action movie set after each take and the director says, "Cut." Everyone laughs if you got it, especially if you got it.

ScreenRant: In the Nobody movies, you get pretty banged up. You're in all types of predicaments. So what hijinks do you find yourself in Normal?

Bob Odenkirk: Close-combat fighting, shooting a grenade launcher.

ScreenRant: As a GTA kid, that's the weapon you want to get your hands on.

Bob Odenkirk: Yeah. More new explosive action and fun things to do. My favorite things are the hand-to-hand, close-up fighting sequences, and the hardware store is definitely up at the top for me in this movie. And then there's just some shocking, surprising, violent action, courtesy of Greg Rementer, our second unit director, and Ben Wheatley, the big director.

Ben Wheatley: I mean, talking about the kitchen fight, reading that in the script and the first discussions about it — I was thinking about the Mission: Impossible movies, where they have this big fight in the toilets, which they built this amazing set, which is all cushioned so they could smash themselves off it and be fine. I was imagining that's what was going to happen for this. We'll build this big soft set, so it'd be totally safe. And by the time we end up doing it, it's in a real kitchen, in a diner somewhere, it's all real. Everything is a hard surface. Everything is sharp. They didn't take any of the kitchen implements out. It was all exactly [as is]. And I thought, "Oh my God, is this how we do it? This is amazing." And then we shot it over about two-and-a-half days.

Bob Odenkirk's Ulysses looking worried as someone runs at him with a knife in a kitchen in Normal

Bob Odenkirk: Yeah, you would want to build that if you could, but we couldn't afford that.

Ben Wheatley: It was so small.

Bob Odenkirk: Things like the grill. I mean, that's asking for real trouble. Because where you get hurt in an action sequence, if you're trained up, and you're warmed up, that's the other thing. If you don't warm up, that could be a problem. But your hands are flying around — and your feet, but mostly your arms are flying on in, and your elbows. I ended up getting cut all over, but that one, I didn't get hurt.

ScreenRant: Mission: Impossible was mentioned, and it just made me think of all the stunts where Tom Cruise throws himself off a literal cliff, and it's insane. What was the craziest stunt that you did?

Bob Odenkirk: Running in snow?

ScreenRant: Running in snow is hard!

Bob Odenkirk: It sure is. I mean, probably the kitchen fight is, that's the most dangerous thing because, as we said, it wasn't a kitchen that was built for a stunt fight.

Marc Provissiero: It was barely built to be a kitchen. It was built to be a closet. [Chuckles]

Derek Kolstad: My favorite stunt moment was that I was hanging out with second year guys and there's a lot of these, we'll call them — I love the Final Destination movies. And there's this death, and at a certain point, they run through it, and it's not working, and I can't remember who said it, but this voice said, "Hey, does catering have any watermelons?" And then catering goes, "I think we have two." And we ended up using the watermelons as a special effect.

Normal hits theaters on April 17!