An Interview with Pat Healy: Part 1 — 'Better Call Saul' and the ups-and-downs of life as a character actor

After nearly 25 years in Hollywood, one of the most compelling "That Guy" actors around is peaking. But it's been a bumpy ride.

Healy as Jeff in ‘Better Call Saul.’

When Pat Healy enters a scene, the mood tends to shift. He’s that kind of character actor—intense, combustible, often darkly hilarious. He’s the pharmacist whose insinuating curiosity goads Julianne Moore in Magnolia. He’s the disembodied voice that sadistically manipulates fast-food employees in Compliance. And now, in the final half-season of Better Call Saul, Healy plays Jeff, an Omaha cab driver whose ne’er-do-well impulses disappoint his mother (Carol Burnett), but put him in league with “Gene Takovic” (Bob Odenkirk), that Cinnabon manager with a criminal past. Jeff recognizes Gene as Saul Goodman, a bottom-feeding lawyer from Albuquerque who’s on the run from the law. That leads to an opportunity: To keep from getting ratted out, Gene/Saul/Jimmy McGill offers to bring Jeff and his buddy in on a masterfully orchestrated mall burglary. But their relationship doesn’t end there. 

The part of Jeff was originally played by Don Harvey, but a scheduling conflict allowed Healy to step into the role. After nearly 25 years in Hollywood, some of them rough, Healy has “felt the tide shift” in the last few years as he enjoys  his first stint as a TV series regular, on ABC’s Station 19, and a role in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon that kept him working in Oklahoma for months with a cinematic idol. But Scorsese is only the latest big-name director to cast Healy, a quintessential “That Guy” type: He has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World), David Gordon Green (Undertow, Snow Angels), Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn), Andrew Dominick (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), and Steven Spielberg (The Post). Healy has also taken the lead roles in several acclaimed indie films, notably Craig Zobel’s Great World of Sound, Ti West’s The Innkeepers, E.L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills, and Take Me, his 2017 directorial debut. His years in therapy, which we discuss below, also informed his work scripting three episodes of HBO’s In Treatment around fellow Chicagoan John Mahoney. 

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For the first half of our two-part conversation, Healy talked to me about landing the role in Better Call Saul, working with Carol Burnett, and the highs and lows of his career, from the sting of getting fired from a show to the pleasures of working with living legends. 

You had auditioned for the role of Jeff on Better Call Saul before when it ended up going to another actor [Don Harvey], is that right?

Healy: Yeah, I auditioned in… I think it was March 2018. We were told, “It’s not a lot now, but it’s going to be a big thing. It’ll be a big deal later.” Casting does that all the time to get actors to do small things, and it [being a big deal later] is almost never the case. But I didn’t get the part. I had read for Breaking Bad a couple times in the last season, and one other time for Saul for another part. But these shows are a huge part of my life, I love them. I feel like my Mount Rushmore is The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Then it’s everything else. There are other very good shows.

So I just thought, “I guess I won’t be on it.” And they were already shooting and I was working, so I had just forgotten about it. I was doing Killers of the Flower Moon in Oklahoma, in July, and I got the call from Sharon Bialy from casting, saying, “They want you to do it.” I could have cried because the years preceding were a little rough. Even after I did The Post, things weren’t coming into play. Take Me didn’t do what I wanted it to do for all of the time that I put into it. And my father passed away in that time, too. This movie Snow Ponies that I wrote many years ago, which somebody tries to make every year, was going to be made. It was cast, we had a director, we were about to scout locations at the end of 2018, and then that fell apart. And it just destroyed me. Financially, it destroyed me too. And by summer of 2019, I was driving Lyft.

Oh my gosh. Really?

Healy: Yeah, not for very long. I got offered a small movie in Oklahoma and I left to do that for a month after driving Lyft for maybe a month. And then I came back and was doing it and I got offered Station 19, and I got offered Them for Amazon, and I got offered Mare of Easttown, which I couldn’t do, but I could do the other two shows in LA. And with the exception of a worldwide pandemic and a car accident, it’s been up and up ever since to the point where it’s like, I read for Scorsese's movie around Thanksgiving 2019, and got cast in December 2020, and was shooting in April.

And I haven’t asked them this, but I think Don [Harvey] couldn’t do it. Sharon said, “Well, you always liked Pat.” So Vince and Peter looked at [my audition] again while I was on the Scorsese movie. Then while I was doing that, my old friend from Chicago, Michael Shannon, was doing this George Jones and Tammy Wynette thing with Jessica Chastain, and someone dropped out of that. A lot of this had to do with just COVID scheduling and stuff.

I guess what they say is true, which is, it’s when experience meets opportunity. To have people not be available because of all these scheduling problems. These are the best parts I’ve ever had in my life. You certainly could argue that [I had great parts] in Cheap Thrills and the movies I’ve had a lead in. Those were great, meaty roles, but they weren’t things that people really saw on a large scale. They’re cult things.

I’ve really felt the tide shift considerably in the last three years. I started in Chicago in ’93 as an intern at Steppenwolf. I was doing shows there by ’94, and then moved out to LA. So we’re talking about 25, 26 years of pounding my head against the wall, always working, making a living, but suddenly the roles are great, the money is great. Everything’s happening now and I’m super-grateful for it.

When did you have a sense of the scope of the role of Jeff? 

I was told it was three episodes. I was told the basic framework of it and the plot as it regarded me, and I immediately knew it was going to be a huge deal because these shows are really important parts of people's life and the culture. And while Saul is not as big as Breaking Bad, because it’s the last season and because it is merging with Breaking Bad in this way, I just knew so many people were going to be watching it. After [my first episode] aired… what’s it’s been, four days? I’ve never gotten as much attention from people, which includes people online, positively and negatively. “Hey, remember me? I was your neighbor 20 years ago.” Any woman that I’ve ever sought the attention of. It’s really crazy, but I expected it. And I knew that what we were making was great.

It’s a big deal because of the show. It’s a big deal because of Carol [Burnett]. It’s a big deal that it’s the end. I didn’t ever worry about stepping into somebody else’s shoes because Peter, Vince, Bob [Odenkirk], and [director] Michelle McLaren, and all these people weren’t worried about Jeff being played by a different actor. I think it’s a bit of a concern [for the audience] because you should know who this guy is, but how many cabbies in Omaha wear Cosby sweaters, are named Jeff, and have an Albuquerque Isotopes thing dangling from the mirror? It shouldn’t be two. And most people have gone with it. 

I had pitched the idea of filming Don's scenes over, and everyone liked that idea a lot, but they were four months behind schedule. They were supposed to wrap in October and they didn’t wrap until February. And I didn’t even get there until October. So it just wasn’t possible to do it. I thought maybe they’d do it for the recaps, because they had done that on The Sopranos once. Fairuza Balk was playing a part [Deborah Cicerone] and she was replaced [by Lola Glaudini], and by the next season, on the “previously on,” they had replaced her with the other actress.

That’s standard TV stuff. I think people should roll with it.

Peter said it’ll be like Bewitched and no one will care.

It’s not even like Bewitched though.

Yeah. I think it’s a little difficult now because as we’re speaking there’s only been one episode, and people are assuming that it’s a one-off thing because it is a self-contained episode. And I will have done three full episodes versus what, three minutes of screen time from another guy? Who’s excellent, by the way, from all accounts.

When did you know that you would be acting alongside Carol Burnett?

I got cast in July, and I think a week or two later, Bob had his heart attack. So it was a little scary because Bob is my friend and also a hero of mine. I also didn’t know what was going to be happening with the show. It became clear within a few weeks that he was going to be all right, but that the schedule was going to get pushed a little bit. And at that time Sharon Bialy called me. I was driving home from set out in Oklahoma, and they had told me that the story was with my mother, and that I was going to be working with a person of advanced age, and that the days would likely be shorter because of that, and so we would do more shooting days, but they didn’t tell me who it was. And I thought it’s got to be somebody big.

So she called me to tell me that they were requiring everybody to be vaccinated, particularly to protect Bob, and she said, “Oh, I can tell you now who it is.” And mind you, my agents and managers weren’t allowed to know anything except for the fact that I was on the show, so nobody knew. You sign all those NDAs, so they didn’t have any idea what I was doing. And she said, “It’s Carol Burnett.” And it didn’t compute. It’s hard to process. It’s like meeting a Beatle or something. And literally, as long as I can remember, I was just speaking to my mother about this a few days ago, my actual mother, [The Carol Burnett Show] is in my mind as long as I can remember it was on, and it was on all the time. I couldn’t process it, I didn’t feel good or bad about it.

So I get to Albuquerque and I had an early flight and I was out of it. I got to the mall where they were shooting and there were trailers and a bunch of people standing around. They said, “Oh hey, Carol wants to meet you.” In my mind it was like, “Oh Carol, one of the producers on the show.” And then I heard, “Is that my son?” from a trailer. I walked in, and she put her arms out and embraced me, and she was holding me very close and saying, “How are you?” And all this stuff. It was just crazy.

When I started shooting with Carol, I was immediately just at ease with her. She’s just a lovely person. She’s such a pro. I think she was 88 when we were shooting, and she went up on one line once and beat herself up for it. So nice, so good, so talented in every way, amazing stories. I remember coming into that scene where Bob and Carol are having that back and forth where they’re really finishing each other’s sentences, and we took a break between setups. And I asked Bob, “Did you guys rehearse this?” He goes, “Nope.” And I was like, “Geez.” My job in that scene was just to sit there and watch them go back and forth and just be befuddled by it, and it was not hard to do.

What strikes me about her performance is there’s a sense of proportionality with it. She just has an understanding of where the level needs to be. Because obviously Carol Burnett can go as big as you want her to go, but that’s not what the part calls for. Yet she still has that easy comic touch, too, in certain moments.

It's interesting because they really don’t do stunt casting on [Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul]. They don’t have big stars coming in to do parts. And I think the only other person, I may be wrong about this, that’s ever gotten this special guest star is Danny Trejo in Breaking Bad. I think Carol and Danny Trejo, that’s it. And so one of the things that I like about both shows, but particularly about Saul, is that everyone looks like real people rather than TV actors, which is another reason why I’m able to get cast.

But Carol just seems to melt into being a woman who lives in Omaha and rides a scooter around and goes to the grocery store. Yes, it’s her, but it’s not distracting. It’s not like we’re just thinking it’s Carol Burnett all the time. And you’ve seen the next episode, she has all kinds of different shades that she does with that character, and it’s really admirable. The icons that we know, many of whom are dying now, sadly, I just don’t think we'll see people like that again. Real stars. They just don’t make stars anymore. Whether it was a concerted effort or just the way things went, the studios decided it would be much easier to have the IP be the star of the show and be able to plug anybody into it. 

It's not lost on me when I work with Scorsese and Meryl Streep and Spielberg and Hanks and Pitt and DiCaprio, and all these people, that “Yes they’re people, and yes they're actors and directors, but these are the Picassos, and the da Vincis and the Beethovens and the Mozarts of our time.” I saw Paul McCartney in concert a few months ago, and on top of being just an amazing show, that thought really occurred to me the enormity of this. We won’t see the likes of someone like this again. And these are the people that history will talk about. And it would be hard to believe this, but you lived on the Earth at the same time as Paul McCartney. Or you knew Carol Burnett or Martin Scorsese.

Even before I was doing this, my main passion in life has been movies, and acting and filmmaking. And so it’s an incredible story, especially if you add in the fact that I was driving Lyft three years ago. I said to myself, I wasn’t going to do it if I felt badly about doing it and I said it was temporary, but I did ask myself, “Are you okay with walking away from show business and walking away from LA?” And I was because I love what I do, but I don’t like the mechanics of the business a lot of the time. A lot of people don’t, so I’m not alone there. I loved the work. But I’d done so much in my career, and I’ve worked with so many great people at that point that it was okay for me to step away.

Was there ever a point where you felt like you were on terra firma in the business, where you were getting enough consistent roles and money, and could say, “Okay, I can just continue to do this”? The Lyft story surprises me because you look at your filmography and it’s like, “Oh, he’s really been consistently working for a long time.”

There’s a big step up from being a guest star to being a series regular. I had never been a series regular until Station 19. It’s just a completely different income bracket. So I may work a lot, and I did fine. I don’t want to make it seem like I was in the poor house, but I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world and I don’t live extravagantly, but it goes pretty quickly. And it was also a perfect storm because with Snow Ponies happening, I took a lot of time off and put myself into working on rewrites and getting it going, and I wasn't getting paid until it started production, and it’s a big paycheck. And so I’d been taking out loans and things like that to get me through. And it wrecked me financially.

But I’d say there was a time when I was in my early 30s, when I went to do Great World of Sound, which was in 2005. It was my first lead, and I had a great experience with it. And while I was doing that, I got cast in Rescue Dawn with Herzog, and I got cast in Jesse James, and I was working a lot. It’s actually when I first met Vince Gilligan, I did an episode of Night Stalker that Vince wrote that Colin Bucksey directed, which was really just a mano-a-mano thing with myself and Stuart Townsend in a room playing a crazy person as always. And so I did that then. I did a two-part Grey’s Anatomy. 

I’d had some rough years in my late 20s, early 30s. A friend of mine, Sam Catlin, who was a writer on Breaking Bad and ran Preacher, said to me, “Unlike you I wasn’t cursed with early success.” So right from Steppenwolf, after my internship ended, I got cast in a show. That got me an agent. I did TV and movies that came through Chicago, commercials. And then that agency had an office out in LA. And I came out here and I did Magnolia, and I did all these things. And then it slowed down after a year or two. And for whatever reason, you just never know. Some of it was me, personal things that I was trying to work out with myself. Some of it was just the nature of the business.

It allowed me to go into therapy and start doing work on myself. But there were a couple years there where I was like, “I’ve had it.” I went through a bad relationship and breakup, and I wasn’t working as much. I went to a pretty rough place. And that was, I’d say 2002 to 2003. I got fired for the first time from any job, including working in the movie theater as a teenager. I got fired by David Milch on the Deadwood pilot, and it just wrecked me. I don’t like to talk badly about people, but that’s one person that just really did me dirty, and it was really unfair. The casting director on that, Libby Goldstein, was the first person to hire me again a year later.

It wasn’t like I was poisoned because I got fired. I don’t think anybody really knew. It was just that I lost all of my confidence. And [Milch] actually called me and told me I should go back to acting school. And the truth was that he wanted someone else, and he was in a power battle with Walter Hill. Walter was directing the pilot and hadn’t directed television before and wasn’t aware that he wasn’t in charge. And it was literally the first day of shooting. It was “fire someone on the first day” to show who’s in charge. And it was me who got fired. I found this all out later from the casting director. I know people like David, and I appreciated his work and stuff, but it was totally unnecessary. Then to call and dig in on me like that when it was just a political thing. It had nothing to do with my abilities. It was pretty horrible.

And people have done other horrible things in this business to me and the people I know, of course, but I just didn’t work for a while. And 2002, 2003 were pretty rough for me. I started booking jobs again [in 2005], when The Great World of Sound happened. But it was just two years after we filmed The Great World of Sound, it came out and it did nothing. It did great at Sundance and festivals, but it did nothing. Jesse James did nothing. Rescue Dawn did nothing. There was a running gag with me that I used to say—and which I guess is no longer true—is “Cast me if you want people to like your thing 10 years from now.” Ghost World, Magnolia. The only thing that I had done, which I had a small part in, that was a hit when it came out was Pearl Harbor. But you don’t get the career bump from it if it doesn’t become financially successful or is a cultural zeitgeist thing. And it just took a long time for all those things I was doing.

But people liked Magnolia and people liked Ghost World.

Magnolia got mixed reviews.

Sure, but Paul Thomas Anderson was a major talent.

It didn’t do well financially. Within a few years, it was so many people’s favorite movie, but not at the time. And I remember Paul telling me, “When everyone sees you in this, your career is really going to take off.” And I think he meant it, but it just didn’t. Part of that maybe had to do with me. I was in therapy for 20 years working out my stuff, and I only stopped ironically during COVID, because I didn’t need it anymore. I had said to my therapist for years, “I think if I don’t have money problems, I don’t think I’ll have anything to talk about anymore.” And sure enough, once I had money, this other stuff really just didn’t bother me so much. It’s not to say that money buys happiness, but when you don’t have it, that just makes everything else just so stressful. You’re working because you have to and doing things because you have to, versus wanting to, or even trying. The whole act of auditioning is often just working really hard to try and get a job that you don’t really even want to do. So much of it is stuff I don’t even like, and then not getting it. So once that starts to clear, you can just really focus on the things that are important to you. I was able to get in a place where I could do things because I wanted to and because I loved them, rather than needing to or having to. It seemed that more of the things I wanted to do came to me.

I could certainly take credit for working hard and being a good person that people like to work with, but I wasn't like, “How do I get in a Scorsese movie or in a Spielberg movie?” The simple truth is that Marty Scorsese loves The Innkeepers. He loves it. [Laughs]

Healy in ‘The Innkeepers,’ a film Martin Scorsese loves.

Years ago I got a meeting with Ellen Lewis, who casts for Marty, and it was for Vinyl, the TV pilot that he directed for HBO. And I walked in the room and she said, “Oh, Marty wanted me to tell you he loved The Innkeepers. He watches it all the time.” And I just was floored. I think I probably cried. I didn’t get that part, but I had a nice meeting with Ellen, we really connected, and she cast me in The Post. And then Marty cast me in Killers of the Flower Moon. We were standing around one day during rehearsals, and we were waiting for something technical. And I'm staying there with Leo and Jesse Plemons and Mike Abbott, and Marty, and he just goes, “You were in The Innkeepers.” And he starts talking about it for 10 minutes. And these guys are just standing there going, “What is going on?” [Laughs.]

And then the last day of shooting was my 50th birthday, September 14th of last year, 2021. And we were shooting outside, again we stopped for some technical thing during rehearsal, Marty goes, “Pat, I saw Cheap Thrills last night.” And I was just like, “Oh yeah, you like it?” He goes, “I loved it. The ending, the title coming up.” And again, 10 minutes, everyone's standing around. He walks away and everyone just looks at me and I go, “All right, I have witnesses!” It's unbelievable. I did a low-budget horror film to work with a director that I really admired, Ti West, and for no money. Again, it didn’t really get a lot of love when it came out. It’s now something that people love.

But, however many years later, almost 10 years later, that’s why I was there. So I firmly believe, Scott, I tell people this all the time: it’s hard and it takes a long time, but you just need to do things because you want to do them and you need to do them to the best of your ability.  The rest is just not in your control. It’s just do the work. It’s not a guarantee. There’s so much luck, but if you do the work and you’re a good person that people want to work with, it can really happen. 

There's a photo in my high school yearbook of me doing the Paul Osborn play Morning’s at Seven when I was a freshman. It’s a play about old people, and I’m playing this old man at 14. And I think my body had to catch up with my soul a little bit. It makes perfect sense to me, even though it was frustrating for many years. I had to get to be this age because I was always kind of 50. Even as a young man, I wasn’t getting cast in traditional young people roles. My body had to catch up with it. It was really frustrating and hard, and I’m just banging my head against the wall. People knew who I was and I was able to make a living, but it got to be a point where the summer I was driving Lyft, I was 47 and I was just like, “It’s just not enough. I’m just not making enough money, and I’m not working consistently enough for it to be satisfying anymore. I'm too old for this shit.” I was feeling it, my body was feeling it, my heart felt it, and I didn’t want to be obsessive about it anymore, and I was willing to walk away. 

Do you ever feel burnt out on the work itself? Is it just the sustainability problem, or is the work itself still simulating for you?

There was a time. I was about to say “never” because I always love it, but there was a time. I also spent a good deal of money because I knew that Cheap Thrills was such a great showcase for me. I got a publicist for the first time, and I went all everywhere in the country they wanted me to go, and it was on my own dime. Then I just started to have to take a bunch of jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do. They weren’t even big things. They were just work because I needed money.

I remember laying on the floor of a Mexican supermarket in Echo Park or Highland Park, a cold tile floor in a puddle of fake blood at seven in the morning on a Saturday, knowing that I had to be on another set of another thing I didn’t want to do at noon. And I just thought, “I don’t want to. I can’t. I don't want to do this.” And my agent had said to me, “You should just stay at home for a little while and just wait for the right thing to come in.” And I decided to do it at that point.

And interestingly enough, I had one other thing that I had committed to doing, which was a short film from some kids who went to Brown, and Travis Bogosian, who’s Eric Bogosian’s son, was directing it, and the producer was Mike Makowsky. And I met Mike, and Mike wrote Take Me for me, and that launched his career and it gave me the opportunity to do that. It’s hard for me to say “no” when people say things happen the way they’re supposed to and there’s some plan or design, because the older you get, it certainly feels that way to me. Things seem to fall into place that way.

Healy in ‘Cheap Thrills,’ earning his money.

That’s interesting to hear, because with you, there doesn’t seem to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ethic. There are these roles that you've taken for less. There are times where you’ve taken a loan out for a year so you can work on a piece of writing. There’s surely an easier path that you could have chosen that you didn’t. 

I don’t think it was conscious. I think it’s really interesting that a lot of the roles I’ve played, like in Cheap Thrills are characters who decide to do things in a difficult way. I think that I thought that it needed to be hard, and I unconsciously put obstacles in my way for a long time so that I could work my way out of them and feel good about myself, like I earned it. Perhaps that early success felt too easy. Working through stuff in therapy certainly revealed to me that I was putting obstacles in my way, both personally and professionally, that I didn’t need to be doing. And so much of acting success has to do with relaxing.

When you relax, which just happens as you get older and you’ve done it more, you can access all these amazing abilities that you have, and you can access all the emotions and all the physicality that you need. Something like Better Call Saul is a physically demanding role. There’s a lot of things I have to do with my body, which I wasn’t always good at. It’s interesting how many things I’ve done where I just get the crap beat out of me, including this show. I don’t think that I chose those things, but maybe they chose me because that’s what people saw in me because that’s what I was doing to myself for so long.

I suffer from anxiety and depression. I take medication, and sometimes that stuff really lies to you about who you are and what you’re doing. And I always had people complimenting me since I was a kid at being good at this. And I think in ’06-’07, when I wrote Snow Ponies, I got so much attention for it and I got other writing jobs, and it was more money than I was making acting. And I just said, “I don’t want to do fucking pilot season anymore. I don’t want to audition for stuff if I don’t want to do if this allows me to do that.” And so I just didn’t do as much in those years. And then when Ti offered me Innkeepers, and then I did Compliance the next year, I don’t know that I’d be able to go and do those movies if I didn’t have the money with the writing. It allowed me to be choosy.

I picked an impossible thing to do with my life. I was talking to two friends of mine the other night, a commercial director and his wife who’s a television writer. We’re all in our 50s and we all just said, “What we chose to do is impossible.” It does seem to happen for people, though, around this time, if you have stayed in it and kept working at it. I even kept studying acting and taking acting classes up until less than 10 years ago, because A, I like to act, and B, it was just good for me to just keep getting better at what I did. But you see Bryan Cranston or Bob Odenkirk. I don’t know if you read Bob’s book [Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama], but Bob is not at all doing what he thought he was going to be doing. There’s no universe where it makes sense, and yet it is exactly as it should be. He is masterful at this. And he had to really, by his own words, learn to be an actor.

He wasn’t necessarily an actor, but he had that confidence and that ability. He’s one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. He could have given up at any point. He was always writing and some things would go and some wouldn’t. Even Mr. Show was a cult thing. And then he gets a call from Breaking Bad [producers], and he doesn’t even know why. Turns out they like Mr. Show. Even when they decided to do Saul, they didn’t know that he was going to have to have all these dramatic chops. But there's something that happens too with Vince and that whole gang. It happened with Aaron Paul. It happened with Rhea [Seehorn]. It happened with Bob. They see something in people. And I think if you’d ask any of those actors they’d say, “I didn’t necessarily know that I could do that, but once they wrote it for me, I believed that they believed in me and I did it.” I’m sure Cranston would say the same thing, and he probably has. It’s the opposite of the David Milch situation for me. Someone tells you they believe in you, you don't want to let them down, and you find that thing within yourself because someone that you really respect sees it and you think, “Well, it must be there.” It’s a really great feeling.

You talked about the Milch situation and how that really shattered your confidence as a young actor. Are you at a point now where you have a certain amount of unshakeable confidence in your ability at this point?

Yes, the last three years. I think because I put myself through the worst of it and I got to the point where I was like, “Well I guess this is it and it’s over for me.” And I was okay with that. I look at it this way. I used to do this and say, “You fucking suck, you're a piece of shit, just be better. You got to be better.” And now it’s like, “That’s good. You could do better.” It’s a slight pivot and I’m just always happy with what I’m doing now. It doesn’t mean I always like watching myself—sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I can watch “Nippy” because it's just such a masterful piece of filmmaking and writing that it doesn’t even matter if I’m in it or not. I don’t think about it.

You would not miss an episode of Better Call Saul.

No, I’ve seen them all twice. I’ve seen Breaking Bad three times. No. I do think I have that unshakeable confidence now. And I think that if someone presented me with something that I hadn’t done before, I might have a moment of trepidation. I don’t want to get complacent and think, “Oh, I could do that.” I want to keep working and growing and getting better because otherwise that just seems like rolling over and dying, and just being lazy or something. I don’t have that in me, I don’t think. But yeah, even though I am incredibly grateful and I can’t believe this stuff that's happened to me over the last few years and the things I’ve got to do and the people I’ve gotten to work with, I know that I’ve earned it.

Part II of our interview with Pat Healy, which digs more into his specific film roles, will run next week.