Variety Celebrates Ten Years Since Breaking Bad Started

Thinking About Walter White And Jesse All These Years Later

♦ This month is the tenth anniversary of the start of AMC’s Breaking Bad and Variety have just gathered its creator Vince Gilligan and its team of writers Peter Gould, Thomas Schnauz, Moira Walley-Beckett, Sam Catlin, George Mastras and Gennifer Hutchison to discuss the show and how its characters changed and evolved over its run…

Let’s start at the end. Have any of you seen the finale since it aired?

Gilligan: Because they have the marathons on AMC, I happened to catch not just the finale but quite a few of the episodes. Man, I remember the pain leading up to the [final season].
Walley-Beckett: It was excruciating.
Schnauz: That whole season — I had trouble watching. There’s fun in it, but the story is painful.
Gilligan: Yeah, that is true. I get asked a lot what would I change about it. It sounds like a joke answer, but I wish Jesse’s teeth weren’t so perfect. I’m not kidding. The kid smokes meth and gets the living s— beat out of him.
Walley-Beckett: At least we didn’t kill him in season one.
Gilligan: Yeah, we were going to kill him in season one and we didn’t.
Gould: I remember being on set in season one, and [Vince] said, “Aaron, come over here.” Aaron came over, and he’s holding his tray. You said, “Hey, Aaron, I just want you to know: I thought we were going to kill you at the end of the first season, but good news — we love you so much, we’re not going to kill you.” [Gould mimes Paul holding a tray and shaking like a leaf.] Aaron — he’s an open book.
Gilligan: Yeah, I think I knew [early on Jesse wouldn’t be eliminated]. Before we really had a writers room convened, I just thought he would serve his purpose in a meat-and-potatoes, logistical sense. The character would give Walt his entrée into the business, and then, what do we need him for anymore? It’d be impetus for drama in season two for [Walt] to get revenge on the guys who killed his partner. But the kid was too good to kill.
Hutchison: As the story naturally progressed, it came out more and more that Jesse did actually have this moral compass. You know he’s not a good guy, obviously, because he’s in this world — but he does have a stronger moral center than what Walt was showing. Of course, he kept getting it wrong, and Walt exploited those bad aspects of him.

When did you know the fate of each character?

Gilligan: Late in the game. We went through every possible permutation.
Catlin: There was no possibility that Walt was going to live.
Gilligan: Yeah, we all knew that.
Hutchison: Walt had to die.
Gilligan: There was a hive mind with these wonderful writers, where I don’t remember who said what, and it doesn’t even matter whose idea was whose. But I remember one afternoon, somebody said — and I was kind of into it for a while — “Wouldn’t it be really ironic if Walt is the only one to survive this?” Because it does seem so obvious that Walt should expire at the end of the final episode — but maybe he’s the only one left alive. Maybe he still does have a death sentence, but we go out on him alive, and maybe his whole family’s been wiped out. That would have been really f—ing dark.

I felt Jesse was someone who could potentially have a new lease on life.

Hutchison: Yes, there was the idea of redemption with Jesse, whereas with Walt — he had just gone too far. With Jesse, he is so broken by the end, but there’s that idea of “Maybe he won’t be so bad. Maybe he’ll lean into the good aspects of his character now.”

Did it ever give you pause — the response to the “coolness” of this guy who had done a lot of terrible things?

Gilligan: Oh yeah. It still does.
Hutchison: Especially the Skyler [Anna Gunn] backlash. One of the big quotes everybody uses is “I’m the one who knocks,” and it’s presented like it’s super badass. If you think about the scene, it’s him bullying his wife because she’s made him feel small. He’s not actually doing anything heroic, and it’s interesting, because people were like, “Oh yeah, he’s great. Skyler’s the worst.” It was always hard for us to negotiate that. The only [way some] people were going to like Skyler was if she started going along with what Walt was doing, but that would have been a betrayal of the character. We would talk about this. How do we turn it so people understand he is the bad guy and she is the good guy? You have to be true to those characters and you present those scenes, and people are going to just read into it the way they do.

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