Bryan Cranston appeared at the Tribeca TV Festival on Saturday and had a lengthy conversation about his craft with New York magazine critic, David Edelstein. During the discussion, Cranston revealed the details behind one of the darkest scenes in Breaking Bad‘s dark history.
Spoilers below if you haven’t seen a particular episode of television that aired in May 2009.
The scene is the one where Jesse’s girlfriend Jane, played by Krysten Ritter, dies. According to Cranston it was even darker at first. The original plan was for Walt to suffocate Jane, but instead he just watched her die, choking on her own vomit. To prepare for an emotional scene, Cranston wrote out a list of reasons Walt would or wouldn’t let her die. One of the reasons he would save her is that she could be his daughter. And that thought stayed with him in the scene.
Via IndieWire:
With no dialogue, Cranston performed the scene, his pros and cons list rushing through his head, “and all of a sudden Krysten Ritter, doing a lovely job acting her heart out off-screen, choking on the mushroom soup that we gave her… in a split second her face lost all characteristics, and out of that came the face of my real daughter choking to death.”
In telling the story, Cranston’s voice broke up a bit. “Even as I say it now, I get a little choked up about it because as a parent, that’s the only thing that scares me. That’s the risk — there’s my daughter choking to death and it scared the hell out of me,” he said.
Once they called cut, “everyone’s going, that’s great. And I’m a weeping mess. Fortunately, you have your family around you, and I went to Anna Gunn and she held me.”
That sounds awful. Cold mushroom soup? So two co-workers were going through some horrible stuff and Aaron Paul was just pretending to sleep the entire time. Someone needs to ask Paul what horrible thing he had to endure for that scene.
