Breaking Bad Set Visit: Part 2

The evening before I scoped out the studio and sets of Breaking Bad in Albuquerque, a private dinner was held for a handful of press and four members of the cast. To my immediate left, I learned, was the executive producer and director Michelle MacLaren, who last season directed the nail biter episode, "One Minute," where the series' main DEA agent is ambushed and nearly felled by a silver ax matching the bad designer suit of a cartel henchmen. Across the table, three chairs to my right, sat the actor Giancarlo Esposito, whose two-faced meth kingpin known as Gus Fring was characteristically invisible and orchestral in that daytime massacre attempt. Esposito plays Fring with the felinely disposition and stillwater menace of a bespectacled Doctor Claw next door. At dinner, he spoke in a calm, quiet tone not above Fring's as he shared his initial double-take reaction to a sequence involving Fring near the start of the fourth season. Having watched the first three episodes, I can say that the sequence in question is the most Easton Ellis-sadistic of the series' entire run, rivaled in visual grisliness only by the acid bath accident from the debut season.

Those farthest from him were drawn in at the table, food on tines, to hear what Esposito had to say with the man seated across from him, Bryan Cranston. Not to summarize each damn course, but for an avid viewer, watching Fring and Walt White banter in the flesh for an hour was comparable to a scalpel high fiving a box cutter over two bottles of wine. Beforehand, Cranston had entered and generally greeted the room, sizing it up as he walked over to a nearby lamp and placed his fedora atop it. This cast an odd light on the signature dome of his character. Pure villainy, in four years Cranston has transformed White from a dorky, broken high school chemistry teacher into a man who wouldn't look out of his element in the yard of a super prison built to hold arch-nemeses of Superman or John McClane. For this, Cranston has been justly awarded. In 2010, he became the first actor since Bill Cosby on I Spy to win three consecutive Emmys for Lead Actor in a Drama Series. And my impression was that, humility aside, he wouldn't be embarrassed to rock gold Emmy championship rings on special occasions if such things existed. This I was kinda happy to see. In the build up to the new season, AMC has released posters that present a simple image of White's face wearing a seditious expression. The image is indicative of why Breaking Bad is both of a feather and a natural offshoot from series in the aughts that arose as studies of likable antiheroes beyond redemption: unlike The Sopranos or Eastbound & Down, it's an origins story for an antihero who goes from A to F, an avoidable one at that, told at the breakneck pace implied by its title and informed by the quickening corrosion of a doomed country. This lends it a built-in expiration date, coded in by series creator Vince Gilligan, of five seasons. OK, six max.

"You know, I prefer to say this is a 'devolved' character. If you look at the show's relation to the Seven Deadly Sins," says Cranston the next day. Our interview is done in the empty wing of a floor in an office building downtown. The floor below us serves as the DEA headquarters. "These changes in Walt are almost Biblical in a sense. And by now the man has gone through it all. We've explored aspects of him---his ego, his hunger for power, the avaricious appetite for money---that are part of a negative spectrum of emotion. Usually, with a lead character you're exploring the tendency to do the right thing. And this season in particular, I think we're exploring jealousy, or should I say lust, and sex. I don't know where it's going. But Walt has accepted who he is. He used to do a [grumbles] 'Stay out of my territory,' and now he feels it naturally."

I've found that it's easy to forget, with the succession of dead bodies and the maturation of Walt's son played by RJ Mitte, that the first three seasons occur in the span of a single year in Walt's life. The Sopranos famously drew upon the slow burn nurturing of a criminal element in the Northeast over generations, a blood oath among emigrates from an older country. And it had cinematic precedent, of course, with The Godfather Part II and Goodfellas. Modern dependency on psychoanalyzing, in the end, could do nothing to reverse it. There Will Be Blood went a step further in 2007, implying that the ruthlessness of capitalism and independence was proto-American, sprung from the ground and countered by a nonexistent heavens, a delusion ultimately perverted and exploited by the Bush years. Series like Dexter (2006), Eastbound (pilot shot in 2007), and Mad Men (2007) each explored the link between their main male characters' nasty flaws and vices to their fathers (or the absence thereof). Tellingly, Vince Gilligan hasn't introduced us to Walter White's parents, he's presented as a first-gen strain of discontent, overlooked in a flyover zone of lower-middle class whites. His struggle stands out as a mean drug war and health care war twist on Falling Down (1993) embedded in a once traditional family dynamic.

"The show has never been about an evil person. Inside Walt, it's a chemical reaction, triggered by circumstances," says Cranston. "If the bully picks on the kid and keeps doing it, that kid is going to snap. He doesn't care what happens to him. Walt's been self-oppressed, missed opportunities. He looked at the apathetic faces on his students. Nobody gave a shit about chemistry. He can't relate. And then he's going to die in two years. It's his reaction. One big Fuck It. A perfect storm."

Noticeably missing at the press dinner was the actor Aaron Paul, who plays the youthful brunt of White's ascent Jesse Pinkman. I considered where he would have been seated. The unspoken joke was that Pinkman was on the menu. Behind Cranston and Esposito at a second table, one could overhear the familiar chuckle and upbeat wisecracks of actor Dean Norris, who plays Walter's brother-in-law, DEA agent Hank Schrader. He was seated with actor Betsy Brandt who plays his shoplifting wife Marie. Norris left the party early, walking over to his fellow actors to explain loudly, "I'm the only motherfucker who's got to work tomorrow!" Later the next day, I was slipped into a side room of monitors on the floor of the DEA office. Director and story editor Peter Gould stepped in briefly to confer with crew and chat. He was in the middle of directing episode seven, and Norris was preparing to give the epic five-page "pain in my ass" monologue mentioned at dinner that involves some serious "Google-fu." Between takes, the show's core law enforcement triangle, completed by actors Steven Quezada (agent Steven Gomez) and Michael Wiles (Assistant Special Agent in Charge Merkert), idly crammed into the room to endorse grabbing tomato beers up the street. They were blocking the room's sole entranceway so it felt like an interrogation, but it was less claustrophobic than touring the empty confines of Pinkman's living room that morning. Reduced to sandblasted, half-assed tagged squalor, Aaron Paul confirmed that Pinkman spends much of his finite time there this season.

I might be in the minority of viewers who believes Pinkman's arc should have ended last season or earlier as originally planned. Paul has excelled in the role, winning an Emmy last year, leaving the show's writers permanently hesitant to do the deed. When I learned that Pinkman would be holed up, and partying hard, at the residence he inherited in season one---a hot spot of DEA intrigue and a borderline lawsuit in a nice neighborhood---I was pretty confused. Nevertheless, my first question for Paul was about the inevitably of Jesse being murked. "I dunno. I don't want Jesse to die, man," Paul said, with a laugh. "That would be tragic. The [showrunners] always say they'll let us know in advance if our characters are going to die. I knew they were serious when they killed off Raymond Cruz, who played Tuco, because originally we all knew Tuco was going to be a huge part of season two. I mean, he had a huge, huge arc. But he had a scheduling conflict with another show. That showed me how they do it. It'll be like that. I'll walk into the room one day, everyone will be staring at me, and I'll just know. No words need to be spoken. But listen, I do think Jesse killing Gale last season was the ultimate loss of innocence. Truly. In the end, Jesse's the trigger-man. Can he overcome that? I dunno. It's a struggle. I guess if I could choose how Jesse dies, I'd definitely choose murder. I think an overdose is just too, I don't want to say cliche [laughs], but I'd rather he go down in a blaze of glory, you know? Not just smoking a fucking pipe and we cut out."

Paul's character is also in a position, without parallel on cable, where he alternates between serving as the soul of the series, a relatively sentient suburban poseur, and a much dumber-seeming orbit for comic relief, thanks to the continued presence of his one-dimensional friends Badger and Skinny Pete. I asked Paul what he thought of a storyline in season three that saw Pinkman skimming from his manufacturing job under the employment of Gus Fring---a deal potentially worth millions---to set up a side operation slinging at rehab to rake in, like, $200. "I agree that was uncharacteristic," Paul said. "But I think Jesse is trying to go back to his old lifestyle but he can't. He's in a much darker place. And I mean, yeah, he has a lot of money. He does, certainly. But he hates that he has a boss and that he has to obey these orders. He likes the risk. But even then, you know, last season, I did think, if someone was out there selling 'the blue' [Gus's crew] is going to know it's either Jesse or Walt. You know?"

When I posed the hypothetical odds of Jesse getting killed versus that of Walt trying meth, Paul chose the former, adding that he had never considered White on ice. Cranston seconded this, initially dismissing all possibility, before pausing. "I don't think so. It never dawned on me that he would, because of that OCD kind of controlling aspect to his character. That would surprise me. But maybe under the guise of 'How good is my product?' [laughs] That's the only way I see that happening."

If season three was a crossroads for the series, where it remained possible for Vince Gilligan to have Walter White shed Jesse and his family due to survival or choice, the start of season four invests considerable time fleshing out the supporting cast. With Schrader bedridden from the ax-attack, temporarily hampering his investigations, Walter's wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) proceeds to collude alongside him and their attorney, Bob Odenkirk's Saul Goodman, in money laundering and constructing an intricate Fring-esque business facade.

"When Walt and Skyler first got together, we're shown this in a flashback," says Gunn, "and there were lots of hopes and dreams. Way back in the pilot, it was mentioned that Skyler wrote short stories. That was what she really wanted to pursue I think, and then she had a kid with special needs, and another kid that was a surprise. Having children wasn't necessarily positive for her, and I think now, she maybe has the potential to become as ruthless a kingpin as Walt. When she found out her husband was a drug dealer, it was shocking but she didn't have a cry. She's more like, OK how do I make this work? And what we're seeing in season four is how I use that to my and my family's advantage. She's pretty shadowy, the business aspect is what she finds enticing, and she plays it close to the vest. And Walt and Skyler, they might be better business partners than lovers. What's interesting is that he's got Heisenberg, this other part of his personality, and her confidence is strengthening in a similar way. So, who will have the upper hand, the final say, in the family business will be a recurring issue, I think. And she's in a difficult position this season, where she has to continue to tell people Walt's money is from gambling. She has to continue living a lie. She's now estranged from everyone in her life."

Gunn grew up in nearby Santa Fe. Is it common in New Mexico for women the age of Skyler and her sister Marie to be so isolated, and to be such shabby home decorators? "There's been no mention of their parents, this season included, so Betsy and I like to joke that they were raised by wolves. It's something we've discussed, a broader outline. I don't know if Vince will ever explore that. Betsy and I have come to understand that they were probably from a broken home and had to rely on each other growing up." "At first, there was some talk about an episode where Skyler and I meet our dad," says Betsy Brandt. "And that he was a troubled or difficult man. I don't know if their mom died young. I'd love to know. But I'd also love to know why the series is huge in France and Utah. I always wonder why that is [laughs]. I think Marie really has a hard time being happy for people, including her sister. I do think they have friends, though, because Skyler had a lot of people at her baby shower, and we just don't see them." "I think Skyler was free-spirited when she was younger," adds Gunn, "and then she marries this pale guy, so what does that say about her past? And Marie is kooky, so she obviously became the more pragmatic sister later on."

"My parents moved us out here when I was eight," says Gunn, "and they still live in Santa Fe. But I wasn't aware of how big meth had become, in Albuquerque specifically, until I had been working for a while in LA. It's hard to say if Vince knew that meth and the drug trafficking of cartels based in Mexico was going to be the zeitgeist here and a national issue by the third season. And now, you watch the nightly news here, and the top stories are people getting killed in this cartel or by another cartel. Meth seems like it's spread everywhere, cities and rural areas."

"It's somewhat alarming how America generally views the cartel violence you see in the news," says Cranston. "There's the governing idea that 'I don't want the flow of my lifestyle to stop,' this sensibility of compartmentalizing. You see it with oil prices, with the tsunami in Japan. I hope our show has brought awareness to the plight of the middle class, to the inadequacies of America's health care. Before Walt became a drug dealer he had to take on a second job to pay for his special needs son's therapy. With the drug war, the current sentiment seems to be a matter of, 'Oh look, the violence leaked into El Paso. Well, push it back. Sweep it up. Throw some money at it.' It's always been the American Way to throw money at a problem to fix it. I think it's systemic in our society. But it doesn't address the reason why Mexico is producing mass quantities of drugs. It's because Americans want it." Paul finds the topic hard to grasp. "I see these crazy submarines, narco subs, people are trafficking drugs in these things from Colombia. Have you seen this? Oh my god. We hear that the government is putting focus on these problems, but it's impossible for me to even say where they should start."

Gunn is the only actor who offered a solid take on the series's end. "I'd like to see Walt and Skyler find their way back to each other. And I don't mean in a treacly happily-ever-after way. Seeing them reach past all the breakdowns would be the most interesting, to have them escape paying for their decisions with retribution. I don't want to see either of them end up dead or in jail. I want to see them win."

The season four premiere of Breaking Bad airs this Sunday on AMC at 10 PM EST.

HUNTER STEPHENSON