I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

I have to admit that Shelley Levine has qualities that are very connected to Saul Goodman.

Saul is weirdly more optimistic than Shelley.

He's kind of unjustifiably optimistic about everything he schemes.

He's kid-like.

He's got an innocence almost to him in his belief and his

plots and plans. But Shelley is more living in the real world, I'd say. He knows what he's up

against and his fears and traumas are very real to him and very present.

That's Bob Odenkirk, probably best known as the shady lawyer's Saul Goodman in the television series Better Call Saul. He's just concluded a very successful run on Broadway in the role I

played some 20 years ago, Shelley Levine in the David Mamet play Glenn Gary Glenn Ross.

But Bob has also taken a leap recently in an even more unexpected direction,

that of an unlikely action hero in a made-for-television movie called Nobody.

So we had a lot to talk about.

This is going to be fun because you and I have a couple of things in common. We've both played Shelley Levine on Broadway and Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross.

Yeah. We both got nominated for a Tony for it. And we both had done a lot of improv.

You know, I didn't study improv with an intensity. I did it as a adjunct of being a sketch writer. I love sketch comedy. I love Monty Python.

I pursued that. And part of doing that was doing improvisation, because it's, you know, next

door to sketch comedy, because you tend to come up with short comic pieces.

You know, improvising makes me think of the part we both played in Glen Gary, Glenn Ross, because I had a lot of

trouble learning the lines. And Bill Macy said that he had a lot of trouble learning the lines.

In fact, I think he's the one who said any actor who tries to learn Mammett's lines

winds up wanting to kill himself. I don't know if you had the same trouble.

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