Breaking Bad star Bob Odenkirk has revealed his shock after discovering he is related to King Charles.
The actor, 61, is the star of the latest episode of US genealogy series Finding Your Roots, where he was told of a surprising royal connection.
The show sees host Henry Louis Gates Jr. tracing celebrities’ family trees, and he managed to look back on five generations of Bob’s roots.
Bob’s fifth great grandfather was Friedrich Carl Steinholz, born in Plön, Germany in 1755. Steinholz’s mother conceived him out of wedlock with the Duke of Plön, who was related to the royal families of Europe due to intermarriage.
Breaking Bad star Bob Odenkirk has revealed his shock after discovering he is related to King Charles III
The actor, 61, is the star of the latest episode of US genealogy series Finding Your Roots, where he was told of a surprising royal connection
After discovering the royal link, Bob was quick to tell host Henry that ‘I’m an American. I’m not a monarchist.’
‘I don’t believe in that. You know, I feel like it’s a little twisted. I understand why society built itself around monarchs and leaders, and they passed them down through generations.’
‘I understand that goes through every society, every civilization. But I think that we’ve gotten to a better place with democracy and we should keep going down that road.’
Host Harry then informed the actor that he is 11th cousins with the current King of the United Kingdom Charles III.
Laughing, a shocked Bob quips: ‘Well maybe I’ll change my mind on that’.
‘Now there you be trashing your family,’ Henry joked. ‘How they make a living. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You ain’t been royal for more than five minutes!’
The actor is has been married to his wife Naomi for 26 years and the couple share two children Erin, 22, and son Nate, 24.
Last year Bob revealed his his daughter helped his recovery from his 2021 heart attack.
After discovering the royal link, Bob was quick to tell host Henry Louis Gates Jr. that ‘I’m an American. I’m not a monarchist’
‘Now there you be trashing your family,’ Henry joked. ‘How they make a living. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You ain’t been royal for more than five minutes!’
The Better Call Saul star suffered a heart attack in 2021 while filming the sixth season of the hit spin-off series.
During a joint interview with Entertainment Tonight, the Emmy-nominated actor expressed to his daughter, 22, ‘You made a chart for me of what happened the last week.’
‘Every day I woke up and I didn’t know what had happened to me or kind of almost what was happening, and Erin made a nice chart it was her version of the movie Momento…’
He added, ‘where I could look up and see, ‘you had a heart attack, these people visited, then you came to, you had the surgery.”
Erin also took extra care of her father after he returned home from the hospital, and made sure he took his recovery seriously.
‘Almost every morning you would wake up and try to get out of bed to go walk to set to finish shooting your scenes,’ she recalled.
‘That was a big part of the recovery was trying to get you to stay in the room and sleep and not go to work.’
Bob admitted that his heart attack is, ‘something I think about every day.’
The actor is has been married to his wife Naomi for 26 years and the couple share two children Erin, 22, and son Nate, 24 (pictured in 2023)
Last year Bob revealed his his daughter helped his recovery from his 2021 heart attack
‘Weirdly, it didn’t affect me much for a long time. I had a strange kind of upbeat energy literally the next day, and every day. It was because I had, like, a mind wipe every night,’ he explained to the outlet.
‘And so my ability to even think about what had happened to me [was compromised] – I needed to hear about it from people who’d been there, and I needed my brain to get back on a normal state.’
‘Now that I’ve been able to make some space in my life – partly because of the and the – I’ve had time to contemplate what happened and, and it makes me think, ‘How do I enjoy the days that I have?’
