As “Breaking Bad” comes to a close this summer, talk turned Friday to just how good a teacher Bryan Cranston’s character Walter White was.
After all, he’s the guy who traded in the test tubes of teaching science for cooking meth in a desperate way to make more money for his family as he faced cancer, eventually becoming one of the most ruthless drug lords the Southwest has ever seen.
“I think he was actually a very good teacher,” says show’s creator Vince Gilligan. “I think, at least judging from the limited information at hand, he seemed to be in that first episode to be using visual aids. He seemed to be enthusiastic about his own subject. He seemed to be trying to impart his enthusiasm to his class in that pilot episode.
“But,” he added during a “Breaking Bad” session at the TV critics’ press tour Friday in Beverly Hills, “he nonetheless, unfortunately, not for lack of trying, seemed not to be connecting with them.”
Adding that dimension, he says, “was me as the writer probably ladling on reasons for the audience to sympathize with him from the get go. In hindsight maybe, you know, I might if I was doing it now, I might hit that a little less hard, that the students were all just on their iPhones or whatever.”
It’s all part of a bigger conversation, Gilligan says, “over whether or not Walt’s particular road to hell was one paved by good intentions, changed him or whether it revealed things that were already within him.
“The longer we did this show, the more I subscribed to the latter argument,” he says. “It’s like that old saying about Hollywood: Does stardom turn you into a turn some people into a creep, or does it simply reveal who they really are?”
For Cranston, who has won an Emmy for his work, says, “I always embrace the moments that I was able to show his teaching acumen in the show. It was his one true passion besides his family, and it was the only chance in the show that’s you know, surrounded by muck and mire that he was he excelled and he truly had a gift.
“That being said, I think there comes a time in every teacher’s life where the overwhelming impact of apathy that is facing them every day has to chip away at that passion and that desire, and I think he was just at a point, now 50, where he was kind of beaten down a little bit and taken his toll, and he’s certainly in a depressed state when we first started the show.
“So he could have been Mr. Chips maybe 20 years ago, but now he’s not. And so that was the point where it started for me is that he was calloused over. His emotions were calloused over by the depression, and receiving this news of his eminent demise allowed that volcano of emotions to erupt.
“And when it did, he wasn’t prepared, and he wasn’t accustomed to knowing where to put his emotions and how to compartmentalize it, and it just spewed over everyone, and it got messy.”
“Breaking Bad” begins its final run of eight episodes Aug. 11 on AMC.