Key Points
Bryan Cranston is looking back on a shocking Breaking Bad storyline he found hard to accept.
Discussing how series creator Vince Gilligan rarely gave his actors scripts more than a couple episodes ahead, Cranston revealed how stunned he was by the outcome of one multi-season plot.
“‘You think I did it? Then kill me. Then shoot me right now, if you think I did it!'” Cranston recalled shouting at Aaron Paul.
Even Bryan Cranston had trouble at times believing how low his Walter White could sink on Breaking Bad.
Cranston walked down memory lane on Tuesday in an interview for Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series with Better Call Saul star Rhea Seehorn. Seehorn, who starred as Kim Wexler in Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul also from creator Vince Gilligan, noted how actors on his sets “don’t generally even get told an outline of what the whole season will be,” and usually “get our scripts one at a time.”
Cranston explained how that sends actors “through so many twists and turns that are hard to fathom,” to the point that when some high-stakes storylines reached their dramatic climaxes, Cranston quite literally found them unbelievable.
Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul on ‘Breaking Bad’
Credit: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC
Take the tragic, multi-season story involving Brock Cantillo (Ian Posada), who is introduced at the tender age of 6 via his mom, Andrea (Emily Rios) a friend of Aaron Paul‘s Jesse Pinkman from a Narcotics Anonymous group. Jesse, Walter’s best friend and partner in the illegal drug trade, grows extremely close to Andrea and Brock, even sending them money to get by when times are tight. But in season 4, Brock suddenly grows violently ill, the fault of either Walter or the drug kingpin Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).
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“I remember shooting an episode of Breaking Bad where Aaron Paul’s character, Jesse, comes at me with a gun because he thinks I poisoned the little boy in the show, and I’m going, ‘Why would I do that?'” Cranston recalled, and he meant it literally. “I point the finger in the direction of Giancarlo Esposito’s character: ‘Gus Fring, he’s the one who would stand to gain by this!'”
Cranston so believed in Walter’s innocence — having no future scripts to persuade him otherwise — that he played the confrontation with utter conviction. He recalled yelling, “‘You think I did it? Then kill me. Then shoot me right now, if you think I did it!’ And then the next episode came a few days later and I’m reading it and I go, ‘Oh, I did do it.’ Oops. My bad!”
Indeed, it wasn’t Gus who poisoned Brock to manipulate Jesse against Walter, but Walter who poisoned Brock to manipulate Jesse against Gus. Still, when Seehorn asked if Cranston would have played it any different had he known, he answered, “No, because he has to be believable. But maybe I really thought that it was Gus Fring that did it!”
Rhea Seehorn in ‘Pluribus’ season 1
Credit: Courtesy of Apple TV+
Seehorn also stars in Gilligan’s sci-fi Apple TV series Pluribus, season 2 of which is currently being written, the creator and executive producer has revealed.
Gilligan wrote the role of Carol specifically for Seehorn, like Cranston’s Walter White and Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman.
“Vince is very good at really playing with the genre and tone,” Seehorn recently told EW. She notes that she can sometimes hear his voice in her head when reading a script. “Part of it is just his assumption of the intelligence of the audience.”
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