I’m sitting on a low brick wall in the backyard of a cozy ranch home on the outskirts of Albuquerque, fragrant sage and rosemary bushes scratching at my back as a dozen men and women dressed for outdoor comfort alternately run over and step on my toes. And I couldn’t be happier.
That is, until I realize that the equally tickled guy beside me, snapping photo after photo of the action, is none other than Vince Gilligan, creative mastermind behind The X Files — and the exquisitely original dramedy being filmed before our eyes.
Seated at a patio table a few feet away are series’ stars, Bryan Cranston — handsome in a subdued way that renders him barely recognizable from his days as slacker dad Hal on Malcolm In The Middle — and Dean Norris, a sturdy, genial charmer who quips that he’s crafted his career playing “ABC guys” (“You know … FBI, CIA, DEA”) and relishes directing his costars in quirky “behind the scenes” shorts he’ll post on YouTube once the series debuts. Take after take, the two toss back glasses of scotch (fake), puff on Cuban cigars (real) and engage in the sort of thrust-and-parry banter one might expect between a suburban academic and his macho-cop in-law … but with a deliciously dark twist, which we’ll get to later.
Suddenly, from a few yards down, a gaggle of children begin to shriek, bringing production to a resounding halt. Resigned chuckles turn to belly laughs as Cranston regards his half-smoked Havana, then serenely asks a production assistant to deliver it to the unwitting young interlopers. “They can’t scream if they’re throwing up,” he deadpans.
Welcome to my day on the set of Gilligan’s instantly addictive new series, Breaking Bad, debuting January 20 on AMC, the network that first took a chance on the darkly comic critical darling, Mad Men and then gave Breaking Bad its badly-needed break after the premium nets shied away.
Curious? You should be.
Still, to give away much more than a hint of its storyline is to steal the engrossing pleasure of watching it unfold, augmented by the nervy cinematography of movie vet John Toll (Braveheart, Gone Baby Gone).
From the pilot’s opening shot of Cranston in undies and a gas mask, frantically steering a trashed RV, to the closing shot of Cranston in his undies roadside with the now-crashed RV, Gilligan’s tale of an introverted husband’s last-stand plan to spare his pregnant wife and physically-challenged teenage son the fallout of a lifetime spent on autopilot is an incisively witty, thought-provoking gem.
“I was talking to an old college friend of mine who was later on a writer with me on The X Files,” explains Gilligan of Bad‘s inception, “and we were joking about how we should just give up writing and make meth. Maybe in a mobile meth lab … a Winnebago … just drive around the country in a Winnebago cooking meth. We were obviously joking, but suddenly this character sprung into my head, and once it did, I couldn’t get [him] out of my brain.
“I remember thinking, ‘Why would a guy find himself cooking meth in an RV. Why would this straight character I had in my brain — Walter White, even his name is vanilla — a guy who’s never bent the law in his life, who’s followed the rules his whole lifetime, who’s never so much as gotten a ticket for speeding — what possess a guy like that to decide to cook crystal meth? What would be the series of events that would lead up to that decision? That’s the central mystery of the show.”
A mystery that so intrigued Cranston, he added 20 pounds, an outdated haircut and a cosmetically enhanced pallor to secure the role.
Thus was “born” Walter White, an overeducated, under-accomplished nervous tic of a chemistry teacher who’s jolted by the worst kind of bad news — and the unwitting insight of that DEA agent brother-in-law (Norris) — into forming a perversely logical, wildly lucrative business partnership with his drug mule former student.
And while the show is the perfect canvas for Gilligan’s complex brand of creativity and Cranston’s endless range of expression, it scrupulously avoids making light of its fearless melange of sensitive subject matters, including physical disability and, of course, the country’s most devastating drug scourge.
“The thing about our show is that Walt is in no way, shape or form making good choices, nor are we ever lead to think he is.” Gilligan stresses. “He is making a series of fundamentally terrible choices … and he makes that first choice, to cook meth, initially out of a sense of rage.”
Gilligan also refused to follow the stereotypical Hollywood path of creating a physically challenged character to serve as a melodramatic — or even worse, comic — prop. Instead, he tapped RJ Mitte, a young actor who lives with cerebral palsy, to play Walter, Jr. and based the very real parent-child interactions on those he observed while visiting another college buddy, Taki.
“The greatest thing about Vince’s story sensibility is that he can see darkness and humor at the same time, and switch back and forth on a dime,” says Anna Gunn, the former Deadwood actress who celebrated the birth of her second child by climbing back into maternity clothes as Bad‘s expectant homemaker and aspiring eBay mogul Skyler White. “But it doesn’t seem unrealistic. It seems like life.”
Even yours, on that one day when life or death or traffic or boredom could lead you to break your own kind of bad.
