There’s a long cover story about Aaron Paul in the February 2014 issue of Details. I really recommend you read the read the whole thing, as it gets deep into Paul’s backstory and how he ended up with the role of Jesse Pinkman, but if you only have a few minutes right now, I suggest reading this excerpt, because it will melt your brain a little bit.
“It was the Prince of Brunei’s 25th-birthday party,” he says. “Six years ago, outside London.” Paul didn’t know the prince (he’d come as the guest of a guest, having risen to the level of prime plus-one but not to that of invitee), but the prince immediately took to him. “We got there,” Paul says, “and I see all these mud boots, and there were all these sheep, like a thousand sheep, surrounding the castle, and I said, ‘Let’s go chase after them.’ So me and the prince and the princesses, Azemah and Fadzilah, all put on these mud boots and chased the animals.” Over the course of the weekend, Paul also broke one of the prince’s hovercraft. “Nobody else was riding them,” he says, “but if I have a chance to hovercraft around a castle, I’m going to hovercraft around a castle.” The height of the weekend’s surreality, however, happened indoors. “I was going back up to my room,” says Paul, squinting under the Spanish sun, “and this guy grabs me and says, ‘Hey, Prince Azim wants to see you in the library.’ So I go down there, and he’s sitting on the couch with Michael Jackson, and me and Michael Jackson end up having this hour-long heart-to-heart about family and upbringings, and I remember, he just put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘You know, if you’ve had a rough childhood or not, it’s all about forgiveness. Once you realize that, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.'” Paul pauses, finds a shady spot beneath a tenth-century tower. “And I’m like, ‘Michael, you are absolutely right.’ And then I go, ‘Do you want to do a shot?’ And he goes, ‘Sure!’ And I was like, ‘Okay, Michael, let’s do this.'”
The lesson here is this: Never try to one-up Aaron Paul. He has a story that involves hovercrafts and doing shots with Michael Jackson in a castle. You will look very stupid.
