Breaking Bad didn’t make its first San Diego Comic-Con appearance until 2011, right before season four started. But over the ensuing years, and as the show has gotten more and more popular, it quickly graduated from a mid-size panel to a must-see hour in the massive Hall H. Today, the show’s cast, including Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, Dean Norris, Betsy Brandt, R. J. Mitte, and Bob Odenkirk, and creator Vince Gilligan made their final Comic-Con appearance (boo), answering questions from both moderator Chris Hardwick and fans.
Oh yeah, and the first five minutes of the second half of season five were screened, too. For those who need their Breaking Bad fix, here are some of the most enlightening quotes from the panel, with thanks to HuffPo and HitFix.
#1. How many times a day do people yell “bitch” at Aaron Paul?
“I can’t even begin to count. HALL H, BITCH.”
#2. Aaron Paul on Bryan Cranston.
“The set is very loose and very comical [because of Cranston].” “He’s the most professional person I’ve ever worked with, but also the most immature man I’ve ever experienced.”
#3. R.J. Mitte grew up like most normal teenagers.
Most people had high school. I had Breaking Bad.
#4. Dean Norris has quite the major marshal stiffy for Hank.
“I think he’s saddled with morality, and he can’t get around it. He’s the one guy — his conscience won’t allow him to do the wrong thing, to his detriment. He could’ve lied about beating up Jesse Pinkman and avoided getting his head almost cut off by a couple of Mexican dudes, but he didn’t. I think he’s that guy.”
#5. Better call Saul a boob.
“The key to Saul…is he’s good at what he does. You see a lot of boobs on TV, they’re always fun to laugh at. All kinds of boobs. Boobs and lunatics. With Saul, he’s funny but he always gets stuff done.”
#6. A fan asks the cast’s favorite moments.
[Paul] tells the story of the “robots?” line from “4 Days Out,” where Walt is trying to teach Jesse another science lesson on how to recharge the RV. They were shooting the scene at the end of a long, and then the focus puller said, “Man, I wish you would’ve told Walt you wanted to build a robot!” So Cranston and Paul faked a problem with the camera just so they could do one more take and Paul could improvise that line.
#7. Vince Gilligan on Tio and how he became a recurring character because of Mark Margolis’s performance.
“It was like getting Michael Jordan to coach your peewee basketball scene.”
#8. EVIL JUICE BOX MAN.
A fan thinks the moment Walt turned into a full-fledged villain is when he poisoned Brock, and wants to know how Walt physically administered the poison. “That’s an excellent question,” Gilligan says. “The writers would always tell the story of the Evil Juice Box Man. The way we worked it out on our timeline is he had just enough time to do it, but it would’ve been very tricky indeed.” They figured he crushed the poison up, stuck it in a juice box, and got into Brock’s school. “That’s our inner story, the writers and I, for how it happened. It would’ve been very tricky timing, but he was a motivated individual at that point.”
#9. Were there any character developments or moments the cast had trouble accepting?
“I think Saul does everything right and I’ve never had a problem with a single move he’s made. He’s the most perfect character in the show. He has his life in balance…He’s the zen master of the show. I think I personally have so much fun playing those violent scenes scenes being attacked by one of these lunatics.”
#10. R.I.P. Jane
The original version of the script had Walt explicitly pushing Jane onto her back when she started choking to be sure she died. Cranston says AMC and Sony gave Gilligan a note that this was too quick for an act that egregious to happen. Vince came up with a different plan, and they worked it out on the set, where Walt jostling Jesse would accidentally put Jane on her back. “The culpable moment for Walt is when he recognizes the girl could die, and what does he do then?” He loved the way the note from the network and studio made the scene better.
#11. No one loves Skyler.
[Gunn] said that every story needs a protagonist and an antagonist and that if the show had made the audience too sympathetic to Skyler to early on, “I think it weakens how you feel about him. It would have undercut the show.”
“It says some things about how people see women and men and wives and husbands,” but that’s a discussion for another day, Gunn added.
#12. This isn’t a quote, but a tweet, about the cold open of the premiere on August 11th. Spoiler.
Is it August 11th yet?
