A decade has passed sinceBreaking Badaired its final episode, butBryan CranstonandAaron Paulmaintain that reprising their lead roles for a 2023 Super Bowl commercial couldn’t have felt more natural.
The former castmates became Walter White and Jesse Pinkman once more to promote the snack brand PopCorners during one of the most watched televised events of the year.
“It’s so easy to kind of zip on that skin again,” Paul, 43, tells PEOPLE of stepping back into his character Jesse. “It’s just like revisiting a very familiar friend.”
PopCorners
“We had so much fun shooting it. Just getting back into those characters and seeing all the familiar faces,” Cranston, 66, recalls of their foray back into the world of Walter White, the chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin whom he played for all five of the show’s seasons. He tells PEOPLE that acting opposite Paul again was effortless: “We fit like a glove.”
PopCorners' pitch was to essentially create a “mini episode” of the series, says Paul. And both he and Cranston knew that there was one key ingredient needed to cook up the most authentic revival possible:Breaking Bad’s creator and director, Vince Gilligan.
It didn’t take much for Cranston and Paul to convince the PopCorners team that Gilligan was essential, but according to Paul, the award-winning executive required a little more persuading.
“He’s busy right now. … He likes to kind of focus on one thing at a time,” Paul says of Gilligan and his initial hesitation to sign on for the Super Bowl ad. Paul adds that once they explained that the company’s goal was to “[pay] homage to something that we really care for,” Gilligan was all in and “very excited about it.”
“There was no phoning it in. We had meetings after meetings after meetings on the commercial,” Cranston explains, explaining how they would rewatch scenes to compare seating positions and tweak dialogue so it better matched the original lines. Cranston says that aside from the presence of the snack, the most notable difference was that he wore a bald cap while filming the PopCorner’s ad. (WhenBreaking Badwas his primary project, Cranston kept his head shaved to save himself hours in hair and makeup.)
“Our characters on the show [were] always about purity in that particular product, and PopCorners has that same sort of mindset” says Paul. “It’s all about basic ingredients. There’s no reason to throw in other stuff. You read the bag and you know every single ingredient.”
“I think it works because [PopCorners understands] the milieu of the show,” Cranston notes. “The relationship between Walt and Jesse, the remoteness of it, that they have a quest to produce something of value. So it’s basically a switch out.”
Though it was a thrill to revisitBreaking Badonce more, Paul doesn’t expect to become Jesse Pinkman again anytime soon, especially now that the series' spin-offBetter Call Saulhas wrapped after its own six-season run.
“I feel like this is sort of where we all kind of hang our hats, at least with theBreaking Baduniverse,” he says. “And what a fun way to go out.”
source: people.com
