Cash money song breaking bad
Inside the obsessive-compulsive soul of the most twisted show on television. W alter White is staring at me. He doesn't like what he sees. It's just before midnight, and we're facing off in the dusty shadows of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, parking lot, between rows of white trailers. I might as well be Jesse Pinkman, yo. The moment passes, and he smiles under his sinister goatee.
He's just Bryan Cranston, an avuncular year-old actor at the end of another hvaour day of playing what he calls "the role of my life," the one that's won him three Emmys and counting. He emerged a couple of minutes ago from one of the production trailers, where he changed from Walter's unstylish khakis, button-down and Clark Wallabee shoes into his own slim-fit dark jeans, leather high-top PF Flyers sneakers and polo shirt.
We're heading to a bar about a mile away, and he's trying to goad me into taking a helmetless ride on the back of his Quadrophenia -ready silver Vespa scooter — and in the process, giving me a taste of Walter White's persuasive powers. And it's like, mostly people back off. Breaking Bad is, at its core, a story of transformation — unlike nearly every character in the history of television, Walter White is changing beyond recognition over the show's 62 episodes.
It's less a character arc than a plunge down a moral elevator shaft. As show creator Vince Gilligan routinely puts it, Walt is going from Mr. Chips to Scarface — from a meek, defeated high school chemistry teacher to a vicious criminal: Last season, he went so far as to poison a child.
Fucking poison that kid! You're dying of cancer. Adds Gilligan, "You can have a main character like Walter White or Tony Soprano or Don Draper, someone who does questionable things, but since they are the protagonist you can't help but see the world of the show more or less through their eyes. Sometimes I liken it almost to a Stockholm syndrome, where you as the viewer start to see things as they do, which is a danger when you're talking about a guy as warped as Walter White.
After Cranston accepted the role, he started asking people if there was a prior example of such a radical TV-character change — and one friend came up with the only known example: With its endless paranoia, Breaking Bad is like the frantic final minutes of Goodfellas stretched over six seasons of television.
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It's a desert fever dream about a doomed America — though few nightmares have such clockworklike plot construction. Its tone is distinctly less naturalistic and its situations less plausible than other greatest-show-ever contenders The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire.
It's all about showmanship. He's referring, presumably, to the image of Walt's nemesis Gus Fring calmly adjusting his tie with half of his face blown off, or a purple, one-eyed stuffed animal diving into Walt's swimming pool from a crashed plane, or a decapitated head strapped to a tortoise and rigged with explosives.
It's the show's pulpy DNA — and Gilligan's twisted sense of humor — that makes Breaking Bad so much deranged fun. In any case, if Walter White — or even his closest nonfictional analog — wants you to get on a scooter without a helmet, you just do it. We chug along, and everything we pass feels like it could be on the show, probably because much of it is: We cruise Ron Peterson Firearms, Ace Cash Express, De Anza Motor Lodge where Walter found out about the birth of his daughter and Octopus Carwash Walter and his wife, Skyler, bought a nearby franchise — given a different name on the show — to launder their drug money.
Cranston takes a deep breath as we approach a traffic light. The blazing sun is long gone, and the air is cool and clean. The light turns green, and Cranston, who spent two years of the Seventies on an Easy Rider -style motorcycle trip, hits the gas. Before this trip, Gilligan had offered some safety tips for Albuquerque, though he failed to account for this particular scenario: You'll get the hell burnt out of you there, and if you haven't been out in high altitude in a while, you'll wake up at night and gasp.
Any time someone offers you a bottle of water, drink it. There's no worse headache in the world than a dehydrated headache. C ranston steers his Vespa safely to an Irish pub named O'Niell's, where we're meeting Aaron Paul for drinks. Paul wrapped for the season tonight, and he's ready to celebrate — later, we're headed to the casino. Heads turn as we make our way toward the backyard patio, which would offer a mountain view if it wasn't so dark out. The sparse, college-y crowd murmurs, almost as one, " Breaking Bad " — as far as the cast members can tell, every single resident of Albuquerque watches the show, which portrays the town as half suburban refuge, half methed-out hellhole.
But some people take it more personally than others: We order beers from a waitress, but a male staffer — a beefy dude with sad eyes — shows up with them instead. I've been clean for five years. Y'all's show shows a lot of truth of some things.
It's a little sugarcoated, though. I ate, slept and drank God. It didn't work for me. You just meet better drug buddies — you guys want a round of waters?
He returns later with our check. A week earlier, Gilligan is sitting in the middle seat of the middle row in a screening room ensconced in a Burbank studio lot, miles west of Albuquerque.
He's wearing pale dad jeans, New Balance running shoes and a black T-shirt. He, too, could be safely cast as a high school chemistry teacher. Today, he's working on the sound for season five's second episode, and giving editing notes for episode three, even as he remotely supervises the production of episode seven, which is shooting in Albuquerque. Beneath his half-rimless glasses, his eyes are slightly bloodshot with exhaustion.
It's wearying, but it's never boring, because you get to be the Sun King a little. There's people out there, saying, 'What do you think of this? Thumbs up or thumbs down. Gilligan is, to say the least, known for his attention to detail — or as one crew member puts it, with fondness, he's a "complete and total control freak. Gilligan spent at least half an hour pondering the color — Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler, thinks it may have taken considerably longer.
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Not long ago, Gilligan and Holly Rice, his longtime girlfriend, were renovating their bathroom, and everything looked fine to Rice. Gilligan and his team, including music director Thomas Golubic and composer Dave Porter, just sat and watched all of episode two in silence on an enormous screen as he scribbled slanted notes on a yellow legal pad.
Now, he's delivering his notes to them in his Southern drawl part Slim Pickens, part Bill Clintonwhich he claims has softened since he left Virginia for Hollywood in the Nineties.
First, he praises and then gently eliminates an entire piece of music that Porter wrote, an ominous swell that signals Jesse's unease as he ponders the absence of a poisonous cigarette from last season. His final note relates to a creepy sex scene between Walt and Skyler. At one point, someone says that most people won't notice any of this, that they're unlikely to have the kind of astounding sound system that's in this room.
B reaking for dinner, Gilligan and I head off to another, empty soundstage to talk. He pours us each a shot or so of Maker's Mark, and he picks at a pile of fried stuff that he identifies as corn fritters.
And I probably, you know, drink a little more than I used to just to help me sleep. I mean, that's another reason this show probably does need to come to an end. Gilligan, 45, grew up in a small Cash money song breaking bad town — his mom was a teacher, his dad an insurance adjuster. From the moment he saw Star Warshe knew what he wanted to do with his life: His initial love was special effects. All through high school I was staying at home on weekends making spaceships and movies in my basement and molding my own face in plaster with the help of my little brother," he says.
I was doing all that shit instead. I had a very stunted social monthly exchange rates 2016 ato in high school, but I guess it paid dividends.
He wasn't a cool, goth-y nerd — instead, he was the kind who made his own Spock uniform out of a sweatshirt, complete with Starfleet emblem, and then actually wore the thing to high school. I was begging for it, man!
Someone should have kicked my ass. At NYU, he finally had a drink or two, went on a few dates. He also sold the very first full-length screenplay he ever wrote, Home Frieswhich became a middling Drew Barrymore movie. I'm in,'" he says. I don't even have to work that hard, and I'm making more money optioning scripts than I ever dreamed.
He was less in danger of breaking bad than breaking fat. I got snowed in once or twice, and if I had been more of a self-starter it would have been great, 'cause I would have gotten all kinds of work done. I could write all day long if I chose to. But instead I chose to play video games and eat Cheetos and waste time all belgium stock market chart historical. It was the X-Files gig that saved him.
He spent seven productive years on the show, and also co-created The Lone Gunmana failed spinoff. His career stalled out again — though he always had Sony executives anxious to hear his next idea — and it's hard not to see autobiography in the unfulfilled promise of Walter White, who went from Nobel Prize-level work to teaching high school. But he still can't believe that anyone bought the idea for Breaking Bad in the first place.
In hindsight I don't know if you could come up with a worse idea on paper for a TV show than Breaking Badunless you're actually trying to fail. B ack in Albuquerque, Aaron Paul approaches a craps table and pulls out a thick wad of hundreds, which will be slightly thicker before the night is through, thanks to his apparently endless stock of good luck.
Paul is a regular here at Sandia Casino, a massive mountainside resort whose nods to Pueblo culture mostly means halfheartedly trying to make marble floors and columns look like they're made out of adobe. I could have retired from acting. I wouldn't consider myself a crazy gambling addict. I think at one point maybe I was. I definitely lost a lot more than I had ever wanted to lose.
And then I took a break and I knew what my limit was, and now I'll come to the casino and I'll have a limit. It's karaoke night over at the bar, and we watch a gentleman in hunting pants and a visor who strongly resembles Larry the Cable Guy butcher "Ice Ice Baby.
It starts with, like Whatever that song's called. The next day, someone shows Cranston an iPhone video of it.
Breaking Music News | Billboard
As we take our seats, tattooed guys in Ed Hardy-style T-shirts with skulls on them start approaching Paul, who is ceaselessly gracious, even when the same guys come by more than once. They cash money song breaking bad pictures with him, pitch parts for themselves, suggest that he cook them some blue meth, and say Jesse Pinkman-ish things like, "There's no flash on this bitch.
Paul is definitely not stuck-up. Though his distinct speaking voice — its nasality and slight overemphasis of every other word — is reminiscent of Jesse Pinkman, his startling pale-blue eyes radiate openness, and he comes off as almost impossibly sweet as he enthuses over his relationship with his fiancee, Lauren: They had their first kiss on the Ferris wheel at Coachella; they have tattoos of each other's electrocardiograms.
Let's just do it. Let's start a compound. Family values come naturally to Paul, who grew up in small-town Idaho, the son of a Baptist minister. His parents were, and are, loving and supportive, albeit with some strict rules. A lot of people are religious and they haven't read, you know, the Bible. But do I believe if you do something bad that you're gonna burn in hell forever? Not just a thousand years, but for trillions of years?
But, I don't know. It took Paul a while to move past his upbringing, even after he moved to Hollywood alone at 17 following an early high school graduation he worked multiple jobs back in Idaho to fund the move, including gigs as two different radio mascots, one a giant tookie bird, the other a giant frog dressed as Garth Brooks. He also lost his virginity at what he considers a late age, but asks me not to print that story.
Though the character he plays leads people to assume Paul is constantly high, he's never had a drug problem. He did have a meth-addict girlfriend years back, which informs his performance. Meth is the one that grabbed, like, nails-deep into her soul and slowly just ripped it out. She was this beautiful being, turned to this hollow shell. He has been known to smoke weed.
It was incredible," he says. I am against pills. I don't even take Advil. I think pot percent should be legalized. Jesse Pinkman wasn't even supposed to survive the first season, but Paul's tesla call optionsschein made it inconceivable to kill him.
Says Cranston, "I was amazed that Aaron could make this guy who is a high school dropout, a drug abuser, a drug pusher, into a guy you really care about. It's a testament to him. Unlike Cranston, who continues to work with acting coaches to this day, Paul is an untrained, purely instinctual actor — who has nevertheless won an Emmy. So it's not surprising that his representatives see him as a potential major movie star. I want to have some private life.
W hen Bryan Cranston was a young boy, he watched his father get eaten by a giant grasshopper. Cranston's parents met in an acting class inand they both worked for years in show business, with highly inconsistent results. Like pre-Heisenberg Walter, they were often downwardly mobile — one year, they'd get a swimming pool, and then find themselves without the money to fill it the next summer, or they'd trade in a new car for an older one.
Cranston's dad, Joe, spent years chasing the dream of being a movie star, and instead ended up with TV parts and small roles in B pictures, such as Beginning of the Endthe grasshopper-attack film. The Whites' house is flooded with daylight, but we're not actually in a house, and it's not actually daylight. We're in the middle of a vast, warehouselike studio on the edge of town that holds most of the sets for Breaking Bad 's best-known interiors.
Wandering around can be highly disorienting: Direct marketing magazine amy bostock inside of Saul Goodman's law office, with its hilariously huge Bill of Rights backdrop, is just a few feet away from the interior of the Whites' car wash, which is in turn right by their house. The exteriors, of course, are shot at an actual house in Albuquerque, which this set is designed to match precisely.
It's uncanny in its detail, though a close inspection reveals some questionable choices: Would Walt really have read the Star Trek novels on the bookshelf — or for that matter, the novelization of the Disney film The Black Hole? The answer is no: I learn that Gilligan is "chagrined" that I noticed: Cranston is far from a Method actor — he is able to sit around between scenes, singing snatches of songs today's is "Please Come to Boston," an obscurity by Dave Logginsteasing his castmates, greeting visitors, and then step in front of the cameras and reach into the darkest depths of his character.
He is a capital-A actor. For Cranston, Walter White's rage is very real — and much of it comes from his problems with his parents, who divorced when he was young.
Their house was soon foreclosed on, leaving him and his siblings to live with their grandparents. And there were broken lives. There were two broken people. I didn't see my father for 10 years. It's like a demon was stuck in there somewhere and escaped. If there's another life for me, I would like to experience that as a woman, because I want to see what that's like.
Chemical Brothers: 'Breaking Bad' Stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul - Rolling Stone
As a teenager, Cranston was deeply confused about his future, so he followed in the footsteps of his brother, who had joined a police-academy youth group that gave kids a chance to travel. It put Cranston on a path to becoming a police officer, which he moved away from forever at age 19 when his pursuit of girls led him to an acting class. This is what I want to master.
This is where I want to be. The police group did have other benefits — after I tell Cranston that Paul regretted sharing his virginity-loss story, he offers to top it: When Cranston was 16, he and his fellow teen police explorers spent six weeks in Europe. Amsterdam was a particular revelation. We're all writing home to our parents for more money, 'We're having such a good time, Mom and Dad! Please send more money! We promise to pay you back! We've got to protect the citizens from the hookers!
After working blue-collar jobs — loading crates on the graveyard shift stands out vividly — he spent two years on a motorcycle trip with his brother that sounds movie-worthy in itself they would hook up with carnivals or bus tables for money, traveling from town to town. He fell into a starter marriage, but realized he wasn't ready to settle down, and began pursuing acting: His big break came with a soap-opera role when he was He wasn't actually famous until he got the role of Hal — the goofy dad on Malcolm in the Middle — at age 42, so he never went wild with success.
He's had therapy in part to deal with his childhood issues, and dabbled in self-help in the Eighties. It was really good. He has trouble naming the worst thing he's ever done. Maybe a little petty theft, and in any case he gave back the money.
Then he comes up with another thing: He was kind of a selfish lover as a young man. The most important performance of Cranston's life turned out to be on a sixth-year episode of The X-Filesin which he played a creepy bigot who was the victim of a Navy experiment that meant he would die if he ever stopped driving at a certain speed.
The episode was written by Vince Gilligan, who never forgot how impressed he was by Cranston's ability to make a vile character seem sympathetic — he didn't let six years of Malcolm in the Middle dissuade him from pushing for Cranston as Breaking Bad 's star.
He let it be known that he had an offer for another pilot from Fox he would've been playing a doctorand he's convinced that's what made the execs pull the trigger. Still, Cranston says, "If Steve Zahn did Walter, we'd go, 'Oh, my God. Steve Zahn is the guy! Can you imagine anybody but Steve Zahn doing it? T here's a beat-up roadside pay phone just outside one of this season's locations in downtown Albuquerque, and Aaron Paul has taken to tweeting its number out to fans, answering their calls between scenes.
On an airless late afternoon, he's taking a call at that booth and making up endings for the show. He gets his head caught in an RV door and it gets ripped off.
Then Walt melts his body and uses it in a formula for a new kind of crystal meth. He also decides to be a cannibal and eats the body.
After a while, Paul says goodbye, and claps his hands with glee. I thought Jesse would die a more epic death than that. No one knows exactly what that will be — even Gilligan, who's impressed to hear that Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner already knows what his own show's final image will be.
But, sometimes, that can be a trap, because the best kind of storytelling is very organic. It said "ding, boom. The final season, one presumes, will return to the flash-forward future seen at the beginning of this season's first episode — in which an exiled Walt returns to Albuquerque, heavily armed. Filming that scene was perhaps the only time Cranston asked for information that wasn't in the script. I said, 'Am I alone? Is the cancer back? Gilligan is anxious about the ending — and not just because of his desire to live up to fans' expectations.
And you don't want it to be! You'd rather be Clint Eastwood than Orson Welles. You'd rather be doing some of your best work toward the end than at the beginning of it.
Though, shit, I'd take Orson Welles in a New York minute! Many of the actors have their own hopes, or at least fears. I hope he goes out guns blazing! And Bob Odenkirk just wants Saul Goodman to survive, so he has a chance at the spinoff show that Gilligan has at least half-seriously suggested.
For a long time, Cranston expected Walt to die at the end — a reasonable prediction for a character with terminal cancer. It wouldn't surprise me at all. The guy who should die, doesn't! If there's one thing no one's expecting, it's a happy ending. Cranston breaks the solemnity: Cranston smiles, looking absolutely nothing like Walter White.
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