andrewromano: In this week’s Newsweek, I write... | Still Not Going To Do This Every Day

Monday, June 27 2011

High-res

In this week’s Newsweek, I write about Breaking Bad, which returns for its fourth season on July 17 and is, as I put it in the piece, “the best program on TV, period.”

To report the story, I traveled to Albuquerque, N.M. and hung out with Vince Gilligan, Bryan Cranston, and Aaron Paul as they finished shooting the last two episodes of the new season. (That’s Cranston waving to me above.) It was fascinating—this conversation in particular:

Bryan Cranston is freaking me out. The skinheaded actor and I are sitting on the cold, dark, 76,660-square-foot set of AMC’s Breaking Bad in Albuquerque and talking, between takes, about the larger themes of the show, which traces the moral decline of Cranston’s character, Walter White, a timid high-school chemistry teacher who discovers he has terminal lung cancer and decides to pay his family’s bills by cooking the finest crystal meth in New Mexico.

“Have you ever ‘seen red’?” he asks. I’m not sure where this is coming from. “I mean, have you ever gone insanely mad, to where you are incredibly dangerous?”

“Me?” I mumble. “No.”

Cranston nods and continues. “I did once, with a girlfriend who was nuts, a drug addict,” he says. “She was banging on my front door, and I was afraid to open it because she was a powerhouse kind of woman. I had to keep her out of my life. And I had this vision. In my mind, I opened the door—I was living in New York at the time—and I grabbed her by her hair, and I pulled her into my apartment. And on one wall of my apartment is real brick. A brick wall, 12 feet high. And I took her head, and I smashed it against the brick. Over and over and over again. Until I could see—I saw the blood splattering! I saw the brain matter! I saw…I envisioned that I killed her.”

For more sex, drugs, and violence, make sure to read the rest.

Done and done. Really nice.