Halloween Kills finally drops this month after a year-long delay, and fans of the franchise will have many Easter eggs to keep an eye out for when going to see the film. Most of these are obviously references to previous Halloween movies, but there’s another hidden cameo that may go unnoticed by most fans. As it turns out, the sequel features a special appearance from Better Call Saul and Nobody star Bob Odenkirk. You read that right.
In a recent interview with CinemaBlend, director David Gordon Green detailed how this bizarre cameo happened. As Green explains, there comes a moment in the new film when (WARNING: MILD SPOILER ALERT) an image of previous victims of Michael Myers from 1978 are shown on television. One of the victims is Lynda’s boyfriend Bob, the poor fellow who gets stuck to the wall with a knife courtesy of Michael Myers.
This seems like a simple way to reference the original Halloween characters that didn’t survive that original movie. The problem? For whatever reason, Green and the Halloween Kills team couldn’t get the rights to use the face of Bob’s original actor, John Michael Graham, who hasn’t acted in a movie since. This gave Green the task of finding another photo to use for Bob, and as the director explains, this led to stumbling across an old image of actor Bob Odenkirk.
In the original Carpenter film, the Bob character, I wanted to have acknowledgment of all the deaths from the previous film, but we couldn’t track [the actor] down or get the rights. Somehow we couldn’t clear an image of Bob for our television news broadcast. And so I was frustrated by that because I wanted to acknowledge Bob’s death, but we couldn’t get footage of Bob. So I Googled ‘Bob 1970s High School,’ and a photo of Bob Odenkirk popped up that looked just like Bob! So I thought, ‘He’s probably easier to find; let’s go get him!’
Jamie Lee Curtis added in the same interview that the filmmakers then in fact reached out to Odenkirk, and they were joyous when the actor signed off on the rights to use his face. Green admits that he’s a big Odenkirk fan and that the chance to use his old high school photo was “too juicy to ignore.” It’s not clear what Odenkirk thought of the request but we can only presume he got a kick out of it.
What’s most interesting about this cameo is that it came about by pure happenstance. David Gordon Green and the Halloween Kills team went to great lengths to fill the new film up with references and Easter eggs acknowledging the previous installments of the franchise. There are even several original cast members from the ’78 film that returned to reprise their roles. As someone uninvolved with the series, Odenkirk only got his cameo because of his first name along with his yearbook photo being on the internet. And yet, it’s already one of my favorite aspects of the film.
Halloween Kills will release in theaters and on Peacock on Oct. 15.
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