This Breaking Bad star is a poet: Bob Odenkirk’s Zilot & Other Important Rhymes teaches children to ‘be comfortable around words’

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk has collaborated with his daughter, Erin, on Zilot & Other Important Rhymes, a children’s book of poetry

The duo recall the start of the project during Covid, and Odenkirk reveals why he is not afraid to use language that is ‘a little more complex and refined’

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“Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” star Bob Odenkirk and his daughter, Erin Odenkirk, have turned family rhymes into “Zilot & Other Important Rhymes”, a children’s book of poetry. Photo: Drew Gurian/Invision/AP

Published: 4:15pm, 12 Oct 2023

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk has known he wanted to immortalise the playful poems he created with his children since they were first scribbled down years ago.

The Emmy-nominated actor always assumed Zilot & Other Important Rhymes, which hit the shelves this week, would be a project he completed once his son and daughter had long been out of the house. “Maybe when I was a grandpa,” he muses.

But when the family hunkered down under the same roof for the better part of 2020, he and his daughter, Erin, wanted to create something that fosters wonder and joy in children in the midst of abundant despair.

“We tried to make the most of the limitations, the situation. But you know, that was a hard time for everyone in the country,” Odenkirk recalls of the coronavirus pandemic. “Erin’s an illustrator and an artist. And I thought, ‘Let’s just get to work on that book’.”

So they dusted off the whimsical rhymes they had collaborated on nearly two decades ago. Odenkirk added some new ones and his daughter, who was remotely finishing up at the Pratt Institute university in New York, enveloped her bedroom wall with her father’s poems as she sought inspiration for the artwork during study breaks.