Breaking Bad - Bryan Cranston Interview

Bryan filled us in on what to expect in the second season, the physicality involved in playing a man dying of lung cancer and dealing with the stress of selling drugs on the side and how exactly the production staff knows so much about making Meth, anyway.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

UGO: Tell us a little bit about where the show is going in Season 2

Bryan Cranston: Well Walter is a man of science and he really underestimated the adventure he was about to go on. He loves the sense that everything has order and there's a numerical answer for things and it's safe to him. This world that he's gotten himself into, he's woefully unprepared for. You've got killers, and they're unreliable and drugs users, it's just insane and so it feels like throughout the season he's taking one step forward and two steps back. The noose around my legal neck is tightining because my brother in law, the DEA agent Hank, is getting closer and closer to uncovering the clues and just getting so freakin' close, it's making me sweat!

On the other hand, the emotional noose is tightening too because my wife, Skylar, is discovering lies that I've sloppily laid out. And I don't know exactly how much she knows, but everything that I've worked for in securing this, my whole reason for doing this to keep the family unit together, is jeopardized by the end of the season. And Jesse develops a relationship that he's very much into but I can see that it's creating a problem for our business and that comes to a head near the end of the season as well. So it's a nice interwoven tangle of web.

UGO: It's amazing that your wife, Skylar has not caught on, yet it's totally believable...

Bryan: We've been working on that, and it's tough because they want to keep Skylar as a smart person and they will, which Anna Gunn (who plays Skylar White) insists on and it's best for the show. But I think what her character has been able to tolerate is that she knows I'm in a kind of depressed state. I have terminal lung cancer so she can't come down super hard on me because it would add stress. So I think she's given me a lot of rope but throughout this season that rope is being tugged or threatening to be cut so it's a real dilemma - and as a smart show and a smart character we don't want to dumb her down so we can get away with something. The more in a corner we can paint the character the better it is.

UGO: Were you at all uneasy with the subject matter of the show when you first heard the idea?

Bryan: I wasn't. It was a great challenge to me and I knew something that the public didn't; I knew the humanity of this man. If you were just to read the logline - a high school teacher becomes a drug dealer - well, why would I care to watch that? And that's what I urge people who haven't seen it to realize. You might wanna cast if off, thinking you know what it's about drugs but it's really not about making drugs. It's about a good man making bad decisions for all the right reasons and he gets caught up in a world that he has no skill set for and he's just dog paddling to keep his nose above water. And what I think makes people follow it is they find they root for the character, they like this man but at the same time they can't condone his actions, of course. So built in is an innate emotional tug of war going with the viewer and that in itself is dramatic and so if we're able to continue this, to make Walter White ultimately relatable, I think we have a story to tell.

UGO: Well, Walter has become a total badass. I've compared Walter to a kind of chemistry superhero...

Bryan: That's the nice dichotomy to the story. It's that good things happen through chemistry. We are reliant upon it as a human race really and Walter is depending on it to pull him out of tight spots. He has that advantage over people and that's really his only advantage. And we might keep the bald head throughout the season even though there will come a time when I finish my chemo through the second season and I make a specific point to re-shave my head. I talked to Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad creator) about that a lot and I said "I think this is right." Because he looks in the mirror and if he sees a person he doesn't recognize, I think it's easier for him to to grapple with what he's doing. And he allows himself to put on these blinders and not recognize himself, to continue to do what he's doing. And then once that's done, he can grow his hair back and become Walter White again. For now, looking in the mirror and seeing Heisenberg, I think he likes to hide behind that.

UGO: So is there someone on the writing staff who just happens to know how to make Crystal Meth?

Bryan: It's one of those things that when you enter that world and it passes muster, it's like now we need consultants. We have DEA chemists who operate as consultants for the show as well as another chemist back here in California who the writers confer with all the time. I went to a chemistry professor at USC and shadowed him for a couple of days just to get the feel of it again. It's been since high school that I took chemistry so I needed to recall the whole energy of it and what it means and how to handle these instruments and the nomenclature. That helped me and I think it helps the show to have the scenes in the classroom still, because that gives it a kind of balance. And from a character standpoint, when Walt is in his chemistry class, he's at home, he's comfortable. It's a soft, comfortable pair of slippers for him and then when he steps out of that classroom, he's in a world of the unknown. But it all makes sense in the classroom so he finds some solace in that.

UGO: The way Walt's customers, particularly Tuco, react to his product also seems incredibly real.

Bryan: You know when you see people snorting, they do snort powdered sugar or sugar and they actually snorted it up into their membrane, which you know, can't be good.

UGO: So have you ever had a personal experience with drugs?

Bryan: No, when I was in college I was studying police science. I was going to be a policeman so I have very limited exposure to drugs in any form, I've never done any of that so I can certainly understand from experience how Walter looks at Jesse and thinks "you're wasting your life! look at you, you're just throwing everything away, what the hell's wrong with you!" You know, that kind of attitude - and it's generational as well. I don't like losing control so that's not something I'd ever want to experience.

UGO: Speaking of Jesse, it's kind of funny how he still calls you "Mr. White"

Bryan: We make sure we maintain that. There is a moment in season two when he calls me "Walter" and it has such an impact because he's never done that before, it's at the right time when the tables are turning and he gets fed up with me telling him what to do and he says, "isn't that right Walter? This is what's going to happen now" and I look at him and go "uh oh!" He realizes that he's got a very necessary role in this partnership as well, not just to do what I tell him to do. So when he realizes that he has more power than he thought, he tries to exercise it.

UGO: Well Walt was trying to push Jesse to do that, handling the sales end of the operation...

Bryan: Yea well he's an idiot! But we take it to another level in this season you'll see, it's harrowing. Jesse takes control of our distribution. And as I mentioned he develops a relationship that I think is bad for business and he wants to maintain it and that gets rough this season.

UGO: Your role is a very physical one, what with Walt dealing with cancer, losing weight and his hair, how did you prepare for that?

Bryan: The only research I did was the chemistry because that's what my character needed to have in his hip pocket. As far as cancer, I wanted to learn as the character learned, same thing with the drug world and making Crystal Meth, I wanted to discover those things as my character did. Of course, Walter had the formula but had to figure out the most efficient process and what chemicals could be substituted and that's where you saw we got that bluish color for that one batch because we had to substitute one chemical for another but still maintaining quality control.

I knew going in I wanted Walt a little heavier because I anticipated the physical changes and I talked to Vince about Walter needing to go on chemo and how he's gonna drop weight because you feel nauseous all the time, food tastes like metal in your mouth and you lose weight. So we timed it out and I knew the last time I was gonna be on camera without my shirt on and then I had ten days to drop 16 pounds because that was the next time I'd be on camera without a shirt so I cut out simple carbohydrates, cut out empty calories and kept working out.

UGO: Was there ever any concern about the show being seen as promoting drugs or the making of Meth? It sure does look cool on the show...

Bryan: I think initially people would think that but when we do the cook we show it in a montage form because we don't want to create a "how-to" video and when Jesse and I start making Ricen in my episode (the premiere which Bryan directed) I chose to keep it a montage formula, it's more exciting and it gets through the moments faster. I think people realize it's a show about a good man making bad decisions. Who can't relate to that? Everyday we go through our lives thinking "oh, that was a mistake, why did I do that?" Maybe not on that grand level where Walt has made mistakes but we don't find ourselves in a daily situation where our lives are on the line, so given the set of circumstances I always felt it was very justifiable what he did, in his own way. And realizing later, "oh my god, what have I done?!" If he could take it all back he would now, but he can't.

UGO: You stepped into the directing role for the second season...

Bryan: I directed the first episode and the reason for that was that it was a practical application for me. I wanted to direct and so I told them of my interest and they said sure and I said well the only episode I can direct is the first one because when production is underway, if you're shooting episode seven, the director of episode eight is prepping while you're shooting seven and then you roll right into eight and there's no break for us, so I an as actor would have to work during production so that's why I did the first one.

Actually on the Saturday night before the Breaking Bad premiere there's also the television premiere of a low budget independent feature I wrote called Last Chance for the We Network. It's a cool film that I wrote for my wife as a Valentine and it's a very empowering romantic drama for women. It explores the area of dreams and wishes and should we have them or look at them as a waste of time and just live in reality. But our dreams give us hope. And it's even more important to have a dream than actually achieve that dream and we see this woman's life adjust in that way. It's kind of a sweet little story.

And as for directing the premiere of Breaking Bad, I'm very proud of it and it stays within our tone and the actors didn't give me too much of problem. I threatened to expose certain secrets of theirs if they did and manipulate them any way I could to get the performance I wanted! (laughs)