Here’s some interesting facts about Breaking Bad, Yo. (Spoilerific!)

September 30, 2013 by Craig Sutherland

So that’s it, Br Ba is done and Bryan Cranston will probably get cast as Lex Luthor or The Kingpin or any number of other bald super-villains. Let’s take a look at some interesting facts about the greatest ever show about a chemistry teacher that turns to cooking meth after finding out he has cancer. Here’s the facts, BITCH!

(Spoilerific!)

Bryan Cranston has a Breaking Bad tattoo on his ring finger.

Bryan Cranston’s Breaking Bad Tattoo

Samuel L. Jackson showed up unannounced during filming on the Pollos Hermanos set one day, dressed in his Nick Fury outfit from Avengers Assemble. Both productions of Breaking Bad and The Avengers were happening on the same studio lot, and Jackson wanted to be an extra during the scene being filmed. The producers denied his request to appear as Nick Fury on the show.
Sony and AMC were initially reluctant to cast Bryan Cranston because of his previous comedic roles and considered both John Cusack and Matthew Broderick for Walter White. When they both declined, Vince Gilligan got to cast Cranston.
Vince Gilligan said in an interview that, retrospectively, having season one shortened due to the writer’s strike actually helped him because he had planned to evolved Walt into evilness faster to conclude the season in a shocking way. With the strike, he could write the evolution gradually.
On the season one DVD audio commentary, Vince Gilligan revealed that Jesse was originally going to die by the end of season one. However, they changed their minds after seeing Aaron Paul’s performance.
Lead actor Bryan Cranston stated in an interview that the term “breaking bad” is a southern colloquialism and it means when someone who has taken a turn off the path of the straight and narrow, when they’ve gone wrong. And that could be for that day or for a lifetime.

Before working together on Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan had already cast Bryan Cranston against his usual type in “Drive,” an episode of The X-Files that Gilligan wrote in which Cranston played a white supremacist with an infection that made his head explode if his car’s speed dipped below 50 miles per hour. Gilligan has said their collaboration in this episode convinced him that Cranston was the only actor who could portray Walter White as they had a hard time finding someone who could portray a sympathetic villain when casting “The X-Files” episode.

Walter White’s alias, Heisenberg, is a tribute to Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and velocity of an electron or any other particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty.
Characters and their values are represented by the colors they wear. Skyler is usually dressed in blue and Jesse in yellow and red (when he is in recovery, he wears gray). Walter wears green because he is stuck between his family and the drug trade. When the Whites’ daughter is born, pink is introduced to the spectrum. Similar color patterns show up during the series. The DEA agents, Hank and Gomez, wear orange, representing police. Marie is usually in purple and many of the other doctors on the show are seen in it as well. And Jane, the recovering heroin addict, wears black.

The actor who portrays Walter Jr. in the series (RJ Mitte), actually has cerebral palsy like his character on the show. However, his real life affliction is much milder than his character’s, and he had to learn to walk with crutches and slow down his speech to play the part.
Walt’s car is a well-used 2003 Pontiac Aztek, repainted a pale non-factory dull-green chosen by series creator Vince Gilligan perhaps to mimic a faded original paint job and thus symbolize Walt’s previous bland existence. The windshield has been broken and replaced several times due to catastrophes both great and small, all traceable to Walt’s descent into the drug world. Though Pontiac’s Aztek was widely derided as ugly, overpriced and beset with quality issues (it never met sales quotas), it has built a loyal following for its versatility and is considered something of a good used-car deal – a deliberate analogy maybe to Walt’s survival skills in his dangerous second career. The show’s production keeps at least 2 Azteks equipped for different filming situations.
Walt’s flustered pizza toss in season three was done in one take, see below..

Since the launch of SaveWalterWhite.com in July of 2009, more than one million Breaking Bad fans have clicked on the “Click Here to Donate” button and visited the National Cancer Coalition’s website, and to date, those fans have donated more than $125,000 to the NCC,” says AMC.
Gus Fring ended his life as a zombie- For the aptly titled season 4 finale, Face Off, Vince Gilligan sought help from the prosthetic-effects team behind AMC’s zombie series The Walking Dead. Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger made a model of Gustavo Fring’s exploded Evil-Dead-meets-Two-Face head, which was then digitally blended with actor Giancarlo Esposito’s real noggin. According to Gilligan, “it took months”. (Via Telegraph)
Sorry all you wannabe Walter Whites out there — it’s actually impossible to turn meth into the color of Papa Smurf. According to Dr. Donna Nelson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma who also serves as the show’s science consultant, “when you crystallize anything that’s colorless, which methylamine crystals are, they usually come out with a yellow tinge because of impurities.” She adds that Gilligan wanted Walt to have a signature meth, thus the blue color. Plus, it just looks cool. So relax already, science nerds. (Via Screencrush)

Finale tidbits

There was one scene cut from the finale script for budget and time reasons. It took place after Walt makes the call in which he pretends he’s the Times reporter. In it, a former student of Walt recognizes him. Walt pays him off and threatens him to make sure he doesn’t rat him out. But before leaving the former student, he asks, “What kind of teacher was I?” The former student replies, “You were good” and then says he remembered the time Walt sprayed different chemicals at a flame and it made different colors. (These excised scenes from the script will be on the final DVD set, said Gilligan.) (Via Vulture)
Gilligan explained that the reason Walt placed his watch (the one Jesse gave him for his 51st birthday) on top of the payphone after pretending to be the New York Times reporter was only retrofitted symbolism: The reason he had to do it was because they realized that in the flash-forward of him at Denny’s that they’d shot for episode 501, Walt wasn’t wearing a watch, so they had to explain where it went for continuity reasons. And so, out of necessity, they came up with what Gilligan called the “artsy fartsy” reason: It was a symbol of Walt, seeing the end is near, cutting ties with one of his “arch-nemeses,” Jesse. (Via Vulture)