You probably didn’t even notice, but Bob Odenkirk (Nobody) makes a highly amusing cameo in Halloween Kills, an old yearbook photo of the actor included in a bit of news footage.
In the blink-and-miss-it cameo, Odenkirk’s old yearbook photo is used to depict the character Bob Simms from the original Halloween murders, who was of course killed by Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s original classic. Bob, the boyfriend of P.J. Soles’ Lynda, was played by John Michael Graham in the 1978 movie, but it turns out an image of the actor could not be cleared.
As David Gordon Green explains to Cinema Blend, that’s how Bob Odenkirk came into play…
“In the original Carpenter film, the Bob character, I wanted to have acknowledgement of all the deaths from the previous film, but we couldn’t track [the actor] down or get the rights,” Gordon Green explains. “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!'”
Gordon Green continues, “They contacted [Odenkirk] and he signed off on the rights to have his high school picture be the Bob in [the movie]. I’m a huge Bob Odenkirk fan. So that opportunity was just too juicy to ignore.”
A young Bob Odenkirk does indeed resemble Bob from the original Halloween, making for a hilarious way to bring Odenkirk into the Halloween universe. You can’t make this stuff up!
