Bob Odenkirk brought a sneak peek of his new movie Normal to the Normal Theater on Thursday, playing to a sold-out crowd before taking questions after the screening. Derek Kolstad joined him onstage as Odenkirk introduced the film and talked through how it got its name.
The movie casts Odenkirk as the interim sheriff in the fictional town of Normal, Minnesota, where a botched bank robbery exposes the town’s deepest, darkest secret. The title was first The Interim before it was changed to Normal, a name Odenkirk said works because movie audiences assume something is off the moment they hear it. “Of course, the name is the best,” he said, adding that a town called Normal makes viewers think “something’s not normal.”
That reaction mattered on Thursday because the film was being shown in a real town with the same name, even if the two places are not the same size. Odenkirk told the crowd, “We’re here because we borrowed your town name,” and said the real Normal is “a bigger town than the one pictured in this movie,” while the fictional version has a population of just over 1,000. He also noted that Normal, Illinois is larger than the town shown on screen.
Read Also: Kevin Frazier Hosts The Neighborhood Farewell Special for 8 Seasons
Normal is the latest action project in Odenkirk’s career, following Nobody and Nobody 2, both written by Kolstad. Odenkirk starred in Nobody in 2021 as a family man who gets pulled into a violent war with a Russian crime boss after a break-in at his home. Normal carries more levity than those films, but it still fits the path he has taken from comedy writing to action lead.
That path started at Saturday Night Live, where Odenkirk worked as a writer before creating the sketch comedy series Mr. Show. During the Breaking Bad era, he was cast as Saul Goodman after the writers saw his work in Mr. Show, and he later drew multiple Emmy nominations for the role. Asked about the leap from sketch comedy to action, Odenkirk said he never expected to land the part, recalling that he thought the set would look at him and wonder whether there was “another Bob Odenkirk” because he did not seem like the obvious choice.
He said he tried to bring “something special” to the role of a man who “you really don’t suspect of being able to do much,” and then framed Saul as a kind of action character who “didn’t fight,” but kept striving and getting pushed down. He put the shift more simply for the crowd: “So all I gotta do is learn to fight.” With Normal, the joke of the title and the pull of the action premise now sit in the same place, and Thursday’s sold-out showing suggested audiences were ready for both.
