Top 13 Bob Odenkirk Movies, Ranked

Nobody asked for a middle-aged comedy writer to become one of the most convincing action stars of the 2020s, and yet here we are. Bob Odenkirk spent decades being the funniest person in the room before quietly, stubbornly reinventing himself as someone who could break your nose and make you feel bad about it. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how completely Odenkirk disappears into each role: the moments where you stop thinking about the guy from Mr. Show and start believing whoever he’s playing. From cult oddities to Pixar blockbusters to a bus fight that had the internet losing its mind, this list covers the full arc.

13. The Brothers Solomon (2007)

Jim Treacher is a small part in a film that didn’t land, but Odenkirk’s presence here is worth understanding as a snapshot of where he was in 2007. He appeared in this broad Will Forte and Will Arnett comedy directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, playing the straight-ish authority figure caught in their orbit with a dry, slightly exhausted energy that suits the material better than the material suits itself. The film bombed with critics and at the box office, but it represents a real swing at mainstream comedy from someone with bigger ambitions than his profile suggested. Before Breaking Bad reshuffled everything, this was Odenkirk testing what he could build, and even in a misfire, his instincts for comedic timing remain visible in the margins.

12. Boulevard (2014)

Odenkirk plays Winston, a longtime friend to Robin Williams’ Nolan, and the role asks him to be a steady, grounded presence in a film built around one of the most quietly devastating performances of Williams’ final years. What he does well here is stay out of the way in exactly the right moments: there’s a scene where Winston absorbs the weight of Nolan’s confession with nothing more than a long look and a careful silence, and that restraint reads as earned rather than passive. The film is modest in scope, and his role is supporting in the truest sense. Sharing the screen with Williams in his last on-screen performance gives Boulevard a permanent place in film history, and Odenkirk handles that context with real care.

11. The Giant Mechanical Man (2012)

Mark is a self-help author whose entire personality is a performance, and Odenkirk commits to the pomposity so completely that the character becomes both a reliable punchline and something slightly sadder underneath. There’s a scene where he delivers a motivational speech with such breezy, unearned confidence that you can’t decide whether to laugh at him or feel sorry for him, and that ambiguity is exactly what the role needs. This small indie flew under most people’s radar on release, but it’s a clean example of Odenkirk doing precise comic work in a supporting capacity: no mugging, no winking at the audience, just a fully realized hollow man who thinks he’s the wisest person in every room he enters.

10. Girlfriend’s Day (2017)

Ray Wentworth is a greeting card writer in professional and romantic freefall, and Odenkirk, who co-wrote and produced this Netflix noir-comedy, plays him with a specific brand of defeated dignity that gives the absurdist premise more emotional weight than it has any right to carry. The film’s funniest moments come from watching Ray treat the cutthroat world of greeting card writing with the gravity of a hardboiled detective story, and Odenkirk plays those scenes completely straight, which is the only way they work. It’s uneven, and the noir mechanics creak in places, but Ray’s slumped-shoulder walk through a world that has clearly passed him by is a performance choice that sticks with you longer than the plot does.

9. Run Ronnie Run! (2002)

Terry Twillstein is a gleefully sleazy TV producer who sees a redneck folk hero and immediately starts calculating his market value, and Odenkirk plays him with a fast-talking, morally frictionless energy that feels like a spiritual dry run for every slick operator he’d portray in the years ahead. Co-written by Odenkirk and David Cross as a feature extension of their Mr. Show universe, the film captures that show’s anarchic, anything-goes spirit in a way that studio interference nearly buried entirely. The theatrical release was a disaster, but the cult that formed around it is well-deserved. Watch the scene where Terry pitches Ronnie’s story to network executives and Odenkirk rattles off corporate doublespeak with the fluency of a man who has been lying professionally since birth.

8. Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003)

Keith arrives at the dinner table in this talky, stage-adapted indie and immediately feels like someone you’ve sat across from at a long meal: loose, a little provocative, funnier than he means to be. Odenkirk, who directed and adapted Michael Blieden’s play alongside him, gives Keith a relaxed specificity that’s hard to fake. The best moments come when Keith is reacting rather than speaking, catching something another character says and letting it land on his face before he responds — those small beats are what root the performance in something lived-in. For fans wanting to understand what Odenkirk was building creatively before the Breaking Bad years, this is the film to track down: a passion project proving his instincts as a filmmaker and performer were always more ambitious than his public profile suggested.

7. Long Shot (2019)

President Chambers is a man who has been governing by focus group for so long that he’s essentially forgotten what an actual opinion feels like, and Odenkirk plays him as a perfectly calibrated comic creation: vain, approval-hungry, and completely consumed by his plans to transition into a film career once his term ends. The funniest stretch of his performance comes when Chambers has to choose between doing the right thing and protecting his approval ratings, and Odenkirk plays the internal conflict with such transparent self-interest that the character never tips into caricature. In a film that needed its supporting players to hold their own against Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron, he more than earns his screen time without pulling focus from the central relationship.

6. The Spectacular Now (2013)

Dan runs the party supply store where Sutter works, and in a film full of teenagers navigating first love and family dysfunction, Odenkirk’s brief scenes carry a disproportionate amount of warmth. He plays Dan without any of the condescension or detachment that adult characters in coming-of-age stories often default to: there’s a moment where he talks to Sutter about the job with a genuine, low-key encouragement that feels less like a scripted beat and more like something overheard in a real workplace. It’s a small part, but the grounded, non-judgmental quality Odenkirk brings to it was an early signal that he was taking dramatic credibility seriously, well before his acting had fully registered with wider audiences.

5. Incredibles 2 (2018)

Winston Deavor is a billionaire who loves superheroes with the unfiltered enthusiasm of a ten-year-old who never had to grow up, and Odenkirk’s voice work leans into that quality with a bright, forward-leaning energy that makes the character immediately likable. The performance is built on delivery speed and tonal control: Winston’s pitch to Helen Parr has a salesman’s rhythm, all momentum and optimism, and Odenkirk keeps the warmth real enough that you buy into his sincerity before the film starts complicating it. When the third-act twist reframes everything Winston has said and done, it actually stings — a credit to how convincingly he sold the enthusiasm in the first place. Landing a lead voice role in a Pixar sequel that grossed over $1.2 billion is no small thing, and Odenkirk makes Winston one of the more memorable human characters in the franchise.

4. Little Women (2019)

Robert March spends most of Greta Gerwig’s adaptation away at war, and when he finally returns home, Odenkirk plays the reunion with a quiet, almost overwhelmed tenderness that hits harder for how briefly it lasts. The character’s absence has defined the March family’s entire emotional landscape, and the film asks him to render Robert’s presence as both a relief and a reminder of everything lost. He does it with very little dialogue, mostly through the way he looks at each of his daughters during the homecoming scene, and it works completely. Being trusted with that role in an ensemble including Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Meryl Streep says a great deal about how far Odenkirk’s dramatic reputation had traveled by 2019, and the film went on to gross $218 million worldwide on the strength of exactly that kind of careful ensemble work.

3. The Post (2017)

Ben Bagdikian is the Washington Post reporter who physically tracked down Daniel Ellsberg and smuggled the Pentagon Papers out in a suitcase, and Odenkirk plays him with a sweaty, coiled urgency that keeps every scene teetering on the edge of disaster. Spielberg’s film is stacked with talent, but Bob holds his own navigating Bagdikian’s tension between journalistic duty and the very real fear of federal prosecution. Watch the sequence where he finally gets Ellsberg on the phone: Odenkirk plays relief and dread simultaneously, a reminder that he had been quietly building dramatic range for years before most audiences were paying attention to anything beyond his comedy work. His contribution to that ensemble is more substantial than his billing suggests.

2. Nebraska (2013)

Ross Grant is the brother who stayed home, got practical, and resents his father a little for it, and Odenkirk plays him with a specific, recognizable brand of small-town ambition and mild exasperation that keeps Ross from feeling like a supporting character. He’s someone you’ve sat next to at a family dinner. Alexander Payne’s black-and-white road movie is full of those kinds of people, but Ross stands out because Odenkirk refuses to make him the villain the story occasionally nudges him toward. There’s a scene late in the film where Ross confronts relatives trying to take advantage of their father, and the flash of genuine protectiveness he shows reframes everything that came before it. It was one of the clearest early signals that Odenkirk belonged in prestige drama as a full participant, not just a familiar face lending credibility to someone else’s story.

1. Nobody (2021)

Hutch Mansell looks, at first glance, like a man defeated by suburban routine: the same commute, the same missed garbage truck, the same quiet invisibility in his own home. Odenkirk plays those early scenes with slumped, apologetic body language that lands the eventual reversal with the force of a freight train. The bus fight sequence, where Hutch takes on drunk thugs and barely survives while doing real damage, became one of the most talked-about action sequences of its year, and what makes it work isn’t choreography alone. It’s that Odenkirk looks like he’s actually hurting, running on fumes, choosing to keep going rather than performing invincibility. He trained for years to make that physicality real, and it shows. The film earned $57 million against a $16 million budget, telling audiences what was clear by the first act: this version of Odenkirk was completely worth believing in. Hutch is where everything he’d been building, dramatic credibility, physical commitment, the ability to carry the full weight of a character’s choices, finally arrived at once.

Bob Odenkirk’s movie career is inseparable from his television work, and it’s worth remembering that the dramatic instincts on display in Nebraska and Nobody were being sharpened in real time on Breaking Bad and then refined across six seasons of Better Call Saul, where his Jimmy McGill emerged as a character drawn with rare completeness, among the most deeply inhabited figures in prestige TV history. The movies are the proof of concept; the TV work is where he built the foundation.