At this summer’s Television Critics Association summer press tour, AMC presented one last panel on “Breaking Bad” as the show moves into the final eight episodes of its fifth and final season. After the panel, Bryan Cranston pulled some of the reporters behind the stage to answer more questions, where we stayed until his publicist found him and pulled him off to his next photo shoot. Help us say farewell to Walter White with Bryan Cranston himself.
Crave Online: You had two great series already. Do you think it could happen a third time?
Bryan Cranston: Oh, who knows? I never thought the first one would happen or the second. I don’t look too far in the future. I really stay right here and now. I have an eye on what I’d kind of like to do and where I would want to go, and a very small sliver on the past.
The industry has known that you were becoming available soon. Have they been sending more TV offers your way?
Well, one thing that I know is you have to learn how to manage your own career. I know that the next television project that I do will be compared to “Breaking Bad.” I thought the best thing to do is to step away. I’m very fortunate and it’s been a great ride, but I think I’m sensing that I’m too ubiquitous and I need to step back and get lost in something else. So I’m really excited about the next thing I’m going to do and that’s to play Lyndon Johnson in a play in Boston. I’m excited about it.
Have you done a lot of theater?
Yeah, whenever I can. I did two plays between the end of “Malcolm in the Middle” and the beginning of “Breaking Bad.” Since “Breaking Bad” started, you really can’t. The timing has to be exactly right for you to fit something in and it just never really did.
Do you think Walter was an alpha dog, and then had it beaten out of him, and now the alpha dog has returned?
I think generally, human beings and especially adults, children not so much but you recognize that you want balance in your life and you’re looking for empowerment. Whatever that brings you, some people find it in their family or their church or charity or their work or athleticism, their collection of whatever. You’re looking for something that empowers you and chemistry empowered him. He felt godlike when he was around it so he was told from a very early age that sky’s the limit, he can do whatever he wants, his colleagues, his teachers, his friends and I think he developed a fear of success that made him implode into this depression, to go the easy way out.
I often wondered why Vince [Gilligan] chose the profession of teacher for him to go into and I’ve contemplated that for a while and it finally hit me as far as what I wanted to use it for. It’s an unimpeachable position. No one will criticize someone going into the teaching profession. They’re above it. If he decided I’m going to be a truck driver, people would obviously say, “What the hell are you doing? You’re a world class chemist!” But as a teacher, I can hide in teaching because I can say I want to influence the next generation of students, and people are going, “Yes, yeah, I get that” and they can support it but okay. So he kind of hid out in that, but the depression built and by the time he’s 50 he’s now fully cast and balled up. It’s not until this diagnosis that it just blew everything open for him.
Has the show seemed flawless to you, as the critics and audiences all think it is?
I do, I think it’s superb but I’m too close to it. I’m subjective to it. I can’t honestly say that. What I love about this whole journey is that I was able to move mountains for Vince Gilligan. I wanted this series to end exactly how Vince Gilligan wanted it to end and I can stand here now and say I’m really proud of it. I think every fan of “Breaking Bad” will be satisfied, pleased at the appropriate end. It’s unapologetic and very “Breaking Bad.”
Are you going to miss playing Walter White?
Of course, I’m going to miss him terribly.
The ending must have evolved over the years, so if you’d stuck with the original plan, what ending might we have seen?
It was in broad strokes, and just the notion of trying to take a serialized television series and change this character has never been done before, and I was aghast by that. And as I’ve mentioned before, I wanted this role really bad. So coming in, it was easier when I read the pilot episode. When we read good scripts, it instills imagination in you immediately, involuntarily, and so our discussion in the first meeting was how he should look and how we should walk and what his sensibility is and this and that, but we never discussed where it was going to end up. It was just too big a subject.
And as the season went on, I never found out. I never asked. I never wanted to know. The twist and turns of my character were so sharp that it wouldn’t help me to know. So I was just holding on, much like the audience was, almost week to week. I would read a script about five to six days before we shot it, and this was no exception. It was about a week or six days before we started shooting the last episode, and Aaron and I read the last script together.
The logline was that we were going to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface, but do you think Walt was ever really Mr. Chips?
I always embrace the moments that I was able to show his teaching acumen in the show. It was his one true passion besides his family, and it was the only chance in the show that, surrounded by muck and mire, he excelled and he truly had a gift. That being said, I think there comes a time in every teacher’s life where the overwhelming impact of apathy that is facing them every day has to chip away at that passion and that desire, and I think he was just at a point, now 50, where he was kind of beaten down a little bit and taken his toll, and he’s certainly in a depressed state when we first started the show.
So he could have been Mr. Chips maybe 20 years ago, but now he’s not. And so that was the point where it started for me is that he was calloused over. His emotions were calloused over by the depression, and receiving this news of his eminent demise allowed that volcano of emotions to erupt. And when it did, he wasn’t prepared, and he wasn’t accustomed to knowing where to put his emotions and how to compartmentalize it, and it just spewed over everyone, and it got messy. So, I mean, from an emotional standpoint, that’s what I was looking at.
How much good is left in Walt as we go into the final eight?
My experience, just briefly, I think I’ve spoken to this before, but I truly, in looking into this character and what happens to him and the transformation, I really believe that everybody is capable of good or bad. We are all human beings. We are all given this spectrum of emotions, as complex as they are, and depending on your influences and your DNA and your parenting and your education and your social environment, the best of you can come out or the worst of you can come out. I think, if given the right set of circumstances, dire situations, any one of us can become dangerous.
