Bob Odenkirk’s Transformation Into John Wick Is Just Beginning

Editor’s note: This interview was originally published during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Magnolia Pictures releases “Normal” in theaters starting April 17, 2026.

“John Wick” writer Derek Kolstad is as amazed as anyone that Bob Odenkirk, the 62-year-old comic star of “Mr. Show” and of acclaimed dramas “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” has become America’s next big action star. Between two “Nobody” films and Odenkirk’s latest film “Normal” (which premiered at TIFF last September), you might think Odenkirk has sufficiently scratched that action movie itch of cosplaying as John Wick.

Not even close. In fact, he and Kolstad are just getting started.

“I think some of the best dramatic actors came from comedy, so why not some of the best action guys coming from comedy as well,” Kolstad told IndieWire during an interview before festival.

Odenkirk, Kolstad, and “Nobody” producer Marc Provissiero are teaming up and have decided there’s more action movies they want to make together, more stories to tell, and a whole lot more bad guys to beat up. The trio haven’t even formed an official production company — more of a “creative partnership” — where they’ve decided that, hey, making stylish action movies with some depth and some humor is pretty fun.

“We have so much fun together, and it’s so rare for that to be the case. We want to do more together, and there seems to be an appetite for this slot in the business,” Provissiero told IndieWire.

Specifically, they want films with serious, dramatic stakes, something that Provissiero said proved tricky when they were searching for writers for “Nobody” and kept getting pitched comedy writers. The goal is this: Make studio-grade action films on a responsible budget with practical effects, some humor, and, most importantly, stories and characters that go beyond the mold of something bad happens to a loved one and a badass wants revenge.

‘Normal’Magnolia Pictures

All that is true of “Normal,” Ben Wheatley’s new film for which Odenkirk helped Kolstad hatch the story. The film follows Odenkirk as Ulysses, a cop taking a job as an “interim sheriff” in the small Minnesota town Normal. Turns out everything in the town is slightly off and not, well, normal, but Ulysses’ vice is he’s overlooking most everything because of past sins that have left him jaded, and that’s just how the town and a sleazy mayor (Henry Winkler) like it. The film is cathartically, playfully violent and has some laughs, but it also is pitched with dramatic stakes that Odenkirk and company see as crucial to the brand of action movies they seek to make.

“There’s a cookie cutter action type story you can tell and it will satisfy an audience, I understand that. I grasp that there’s an audience out there, and I don’t want to name names, but I don’t need to because you can conjure them up without effort,” Odenkirk said. “There is a kind of movie that if you make it and it looks reliably satisfying, it will get its audience. But I’m always trying to find something more, find something more to the form, smuggle in something more than just the accepted values of that genre.”

It’s not as though the trio today has a slate of projects in development and others gearing up production, but the trio is constantly noodling with ideas. On one end, Odenkirk wants to make an action movie in the vein of “Police Story” and other early Jackie Chan classics, one with no bloodshed, no guns, and a PG-rating. Essentially something you can watch “with your 8-year-old.” And on the other end, because of “the turmoil and the darkness” inside of him, he wants to make a “fucking horrifically violent” thriller in the vein of “Oldboy” meets “Taxi Driver.” Even as we’re speaking, the wheels seem to be turning in Odenkirk’s head for another idea he’s eager to flesh out.

Kolstad fortunately has already been thinking about the lot, and Odenkirk says the “John Wick” creator is sitting on a plethora of treatments they have not yet begun to mine. Odenkirk downplays his filmography and says that though he may also be a writer, his experience hardly lies in feature screenplay writing (he calls his dozen or so features he’s written “rough shit”), and he’s merely pushing Kolstad in interesting directions.

“The way Derek talks about and learned about movies is the way I did sketch comedy,” Odenkirk said. “The other day I mentioned this notion to him, and he just rattled off movies that fit that structure tonally, thematically, structurally, and I haven’t seen any of them.”

‘Nobody 2‘

There’s also a clear market for the type of film they want to make. With “Better Call Saul,” Odenkirk found that portraying Saul Goodman gave him a perception amongst audiences that he was a “striver who would never quit and someone who might do something dastardly but was always on the right side of things,” a dead ringer for an action hero. That perception was especially true internationally, where buyers appreciated the film’s modest, sub-$20 million budget, allowing “Normal” to pre-sell distribution rights to independently fund production. “Normal” is a sales title on the TIFF market looking for a North American deal.

All Odenkirk had to learn was the fighting. And he found it wasn’t Saul Goodman that gave him a leg up in the combat department but his sketch comedy writing with “Mr. Show,” “SNL,” for Conan, and beyond.

“I really dug it. It’s funny, it’s fun, it’s got some DNA in common with sketch comedy,” Odenkirk said. “A fight sequence is between 2-6 minutes long. Like a sketch, I think it should have a beginning, middle, and end, and I think it should have a character. Each fight should have some kind of character to it and a way you can describe it, whether it’s the funniest fight in a movie or one that starts as one kind of fight and transforms into another. It should have its own little body to it and personality.”

Kolstad and Provissiero never envisioned this would be such a calling for Odenkirk, but they can tell why being an action star has grown on him.

“There’s a discipline in comedy, because comedy is skill, timing, and luck, and in action movies, a lot of it is timing. And he’s got that,” Kolstad said.