Celebrating 10 years of ‘Breaking Bad’
Show’s creator and star take a look back at TV’s “first binge-able show”
If you step onto a set with Bryan Cranston, you’d best tread lightly. On April 3, 2013, the six-time Emmy winner clocked his last day of work on AMC’s Breaking Bad, which premiered 10 years ago this week, and cemented his status as one of TV’s greatest anti-heroes with his portrayal of chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White.
Creator Vince Gilligan wanted the last day of shooting in Albuquerque to be special, so he decided to end with a flashback scene of Walt and his protégé Jesse Pinkman’s (Aaron Paul) first meth cookout in a makeshift RV lab. The scene, a callback to the pilot episode, was re-created for “Ozymandias,” the third-to-last of the series.
Dressed in Walt’s iconic apron and tighty-whities, Cranston saw how emotional Paul was on set that day and wanted to cheer him up. So, as they were shooting one of their final takes, he jokingly dropped his underpants and exposed his butt.
“We kind of went out the same way we went in: having fun, keeping it light,” Cranston says. “I would often try to crack him up throughout the show. He was really dreading that last day, and it was nice to see him have a good moment.”
Adds Paul: “I thought, ‘Wow, I am going to miss this show and all of these beautiful people.’ I miss his (butt) every single day.”
Ceding directing duties for “Ozymandias” to The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson, Gilligan was free to wander around the remote desert set and shoot behindthe-scenes photos, which he shared exclusively with USA TODAY.
“It was a very emotional day, but a perfect last day, because we ended up where we started off,” Gilligan says. “We were re-creating a time and place that existed in the pilot, 62 episodes prior, and everyone was in a really good mood but bittersweet as well.”
Cranston prepared for the occasion by inviting Paul over for dinner to read their final script.
“It marked a completion of a journey,” Cranston says. But “ironically, I don’t miss playing that character. I was so satisfied with the whole journey that, while it remains the most rewarding experience of my career, I don’t really miss playing Walter White — I think because it was so complete.”
The actors commemorated their time together by hiring a tattoo artist for the wrap party, where both got inked: Paul with the words “No half measures” (a line from the show by Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut) on his bicep; and Cranston with the show’s logo (the peri-
odic table symbols of “Br” and “Ba”) inside his right-hand ring finger.
“I hadn’t thought about (the design) until I was driving to the party and realized the finality of the situation,” Cranston says. “I look at it often, and it makes me smile every time I see it.”
The actor, who had been best known for playing Jerry’s dentist on Seinfeld and a bumbling dad on Malcolm in the Middle, credits the show’s popularity to Netflix. Spurred in part by critical raves and 16 Emmy wins, new fans caught up with the drama throughout its run and led modest ratings to spike in its final seasons.
“We were very fortunate to be that first binge-able show,” Cranston says. “And once you give the audience a shot of Breaking Bad, they become addicted and had to see it through.”
Bad’s format lent itself to life beyond a typical network run, Gilligan says. “Breaking Bad was such a hyper-serialized show that on a typical network schedule, having that be the only way the show got out there, it might’ve failed. But in a world where people were able to catch up and consume episodes like potato chips, suddenly a show like this was able to work.”
As for anything he might’ve done differently, Gilligan has only one regret.
“I was watching an old episode the other night, and it really does irk me: Jesse’s teeth were too perfect,” he says, laughing. “Aaron Paul has an absolutely perfect pair of choppers in real life, and we never gunked them up or made him look like he had missing teeth.
“I don’t know how you get beaten to a pulp that many times and smoke that much meth and not have your teeth look worse for wear.”