LOS ANGELES — Bob Odenkirk knows what kind of action star he is — and, maybe more importantly, isn't.

At 63, less than five years removed from a heart attack that nearly ended his life, the actor understands exactly what his body is capable of. He can't do high spinning kicks or elaborate gymnastics. He can't dodge 30 punches in a row. He's the same age as Tom Cruise but you're not going to see him hanging off the wing of a plane or sprinting across rooftops "Mission: Impossible"-style.

"Tom Cruise is just in better shape than me," Odenkirk says over Zoom from New York in the gravelly, matter-of-fact Midwestern cadence that has carried him from his '90s alt-comedy sketch series "Mr. Show" through his Emmy-winning turn as Saul Goodman on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" and into films like "The Post" and "Nebraska." "I mean, he can do things I can't sell."

What Odenkirk can sell, as his unlikely turn as a suburban dad with a violent past in the 2021 sleeper hit "Nobody" and last year's sequel "Nobody 2" made clear, is something more specific and, in its way, a lot more interesting. He can show you what it looks like when your neighbor — a guy who could be teaching an intro to business class at a night school — is capable of lethal violence. And he can be likable and funny while doing it.

"There's a certain kind of fighting that I can do that fits my face and my body type," Odenkirk explains. "I can play a guy who is just going to wear the other person down. He's going to do the simplest moves he can find and they're going to be hard and they're going to hurt. That's what I can do."

If it wasn't already clear that Odenkirk isn't your conventional action star, his new film "Normal" should seal the deal. In theaters Friday after a strong reception at SXSW last month, the genre-scrambling, darkly comic neo-Western casts him as Ulysses, a principled small-town sheriff who takes a temporary posting in a sleepy corner of Minnesota called Normal. Haunted by a failed marriage and a past case that ended badly, he arrives hoping for a quiet stint and instead stumbles into a mystery involving his dead predecessor and a town whose friendly residents are suspiciously armed to the teeth and sitting on an enormous amount of wealth. As he starts to pull at the thread, Ulysses finds himself up against not just the entire community but — improbably, given the setting — the yakuza.

Indie distributor Magnolia's biggest theatrical push to date (opening on approximately 2,000 screens), "Normal" has enough over-the-top violence and elaborately choreographed kills to satisfy anyone coming for carnage. But for Odenkirk, it was the prospect of a slow burn that appealed to him, with a first stretch that plays closer to "Fargo" before the mayhem ramps up to almost cartoonish proportions.

"This one had, like, one-and-a-half acts of mystery and a humorous look at small-town people," he says. "That was the part where I was like, I want to do that. Because, you know, otherwise, you don't need me — get Jason Statham."

Setting the film in the Midwest helped tune it to Odenkirk's particular temperament. The actor, who was born and raised in Illinois, developed the story with "Nobody" screenwriter Derek Kolstad, best known for creating the "John Wick" franchise, and the two quickly bonded over a shared sensibility.

"Bob immediately leaped into this idea because he grew up in Naperville," Kolstad says. "I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and we totally understood the mentality of small towns and how you can have the onion of a deep, dark secret. We love small towns. We're not making fun of them."

The character they built for "Normal" was intentionally less mythic and more grounded than the former government assassin Odenkirk plays in "Nobody."

"He is much more scrappy and internal and less about male rage," says the film's English director Ben Wheatley, best known for genre-bending fare like "High-Rise" and "Free Fire," who drew on influences ranging from Westerns to Hong Kong action films to the slapstick of the Three Stooges and "Evil Dead II." "Ulysses can fight, but it's not about him becoming this kind of revengeful wraith moving through the movie dispatching people. It's action, but with empathy."

For Odenkirk, part of the appeal was the opportunity to play someone closer to where he is now, not just physically but emotionally. "I love the chance to play someone who is my age, who maybe was proud and full of himself when he was younger and then made some bad choices and feels a little lost," he says. "The older you get, the more you realize you don't know what's going on. I like playing a person who has that level of experience of the world."

Since surviving his "widowmaker" heart attack on the New Mexico set of "Better Call Saul" in 2021 — an event that left him unconscious for a day and with no memory of the following week — Odenkirk has little interest in projecting invincibility. If anything, the experience reinforced the value of the kind of work he's been doing.

"The truth is, the action movie helped save my heart," Odenkirk says, noting that the two years of intense training he did for "Nobody" helped build up the blood flow that kept his heart from sustaining lasting damage.

The aftermath of his near-death experience, he says, was just as profound. "The biggest thing was just this appreciation for being alive," Odenkirk recalls. "Those first couple weeks, I woke up without any worry in my mind. I just rediscovered the world every morning and loved it. That feeling has faded — it's not as complete and pure as it was. But I know it's there."

That shift has carried into Odenkirk's approach to his work. In recent years, he has moved more freely between film, television and the stage, including a Tony nomination last year for his performance as washed-up real estate salesman Shelley Levene in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's play "Glengarry Glen Ross," choosing roles less for how they fit together than for how far they take him from what he's done before.

"I think he does it to surprise himself," says his "Normal" co-star Henry Winkler, who befriended the actor years ago when they met at a taping of "Late Night With Seth Meyers." "When you choose this profession, you don't just say the words. The fun is making somebody come alive that you don't necessarily identify with."

What comes next is, by Odenkirk's own admission, still taking shape. At this stage, the actor, who has a home in New York but lives primarily in L.A., is deliberately prioritizing the things he actually wants to do rather than rushing to line up the next job. He recently climbed Machu Picchu with his longtime friend and "Mr. Show" co-star David Cross, filming the trip for a documentary, and has been helping his son — one of two adult children he shares with his wife Naomi, a producer, whom he married in 1997 — develop a television pilot.

"I'm not racing to get my dance card full," he says, almost as an aside. "I might be retired." After letting the thought hang a moment, he smiles and shakes his head. "I don't think so. Nobody quits show business."

There's a version of Odenkirk's next phase that's easy to imagine: a late-career run of durable, increasingly grim action roles, the kind that has kept actors like Liam Neeson working steadily into their 70s. But Odenkirk sounds less interested in settling into that groove than in reshaping it. "I understand that the audience goes to see weapons and death and gore," he says. "But for me, I've got to be careful how much of that I put into the world."

One possibility he's been actively discussing with Kolstad pushes in almost the opposite direction, inspired by a mutual love of Jackie Chan. "Those early Jackie Chan films are really Buster Keaton–ish — very likable, not bloody," he says. "This would be PG, essentially. You could even say G-rated. There would be no blood in it. It's doing clever fighting that makes you smile and laugh."

And if "Normal" succeeds at the box office, he's already thinking about where Ulysses might go next. Odenkirk and Kolstad have begun kicking around ideas for extending the character into an ongoing franchise. "There is no character I've ever done that I feel as close to," he says. "With Saul and even with 'Nobody,' slipping into that guy's skin is a little challenging. This guy is a lot less challenging and I like playing him. So I can imagine resuming his story."

A little later in our conversation, he pulls out his phone, scrolls for a second, then hits play. What comes through the speaker is a demo he recorded singing a Tom Lehrer-style satirical show tune: "It's a New York night and it feels so right / The New York lights are shining bright … in Chicago."

The song is part of an album he's recording called "Odenkirk Sings Nutter," featuring comedy numbers written by writer and playwright Mark Nutter, a longtime friend. Nutter, he explains, has spent years writing sharp, absurdist songs and musicals that have remained largely under the radar. The album is an effort to change that.

"Like with doing an action movie, it's this notion of: If I can do this even respectably, I'm going to blow everyone's mind," he says. "They're gonna be like, 'Are you kidding?' If I have any dream, it would be somebody listens to it and says, 'Who is this guy? Why don't we take some of these songs or one of his musicals and get people who actually can sing to do them?' "

He smiles, more at the attempt than the outcome.

"My whole career has felt like risk and danger and potentially being very deeply embarrassed on a world stage," Odenkirk says. "Some part of me says I don't give a s— and that it's fine if I'm embarrassed. I don't know if that's true. But I'm willing to risk it."

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