Anna Gunn, "Breaking Bad" and "Deadwood" actress: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Anna Gunn’s arrival in the city of Deadwood on the HBO series of the same name set off one of the craziest love triangles in history. The widow of Sheriff Bullock’s brother changed that crazy, foul-mouthed, Wild West town forever.

Now, it’s early in the run of the new critically-acclaimed AMC series “Breaking Bad,” but I suspect that as Bryan Cranston’s wife, Skyler, the lovely Anna Gunn will be anything but shy and retiring.

You can LISTEN to this interview by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

Click to open separate window

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: You have done a lot of TV in your career, but these last two series, “Deadwood” and now “Breaking Bad,” must have really changed your career trajectory.

ANNA GUNN: Absolutely. Yes, they absolutely have. I just feel like it’s been an amazing ride into a new place for me, and it’s been something I’ve dreamed of. I’ve dreamed of working with David Milch for a long time on a series ever since doing a little role for him on “NYPD Blue,” and we got the opportunity about nine years later. So that was an amazing surprise. And then that was a wild ride through the Wild West, and I loved it. I had a great time on that. And then this came along. I had a baby in between, and then this came along. And again, it was just such a marvelous, delicious surprise. When I read the script, I just immediately said yes. I loved it and went in and was fortunate enough to get the role. And I think Vince Gilligan is brilliant. He’s a brilliant writer, and I love the entire cast, and we’ve been having a really good time.






ANDELMAN: “Deadwood” is a crazy concept, but “Breaking Bad,” it’s even strange to just say the title of this show.

GUNN: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: What was your first reaction when you got the gist of what this was about?

GUNN: Well, I was just sent the script, and I don’t think anybody told me what the story of the script was. I just read it, and I thought, as it unfolded and I turned each page, I just got more and more enthralled and excited about it because it’s rare to see an everyday man with the struggles that he’s dealing with, and then you put him in this position where he’s essentially got to make some choices. He makes a choice that changes his entire life, that will change the lives of his family, and it’s a morality play, I think, in a lot of ways. I think it’s a wonderful way for people to look into themselves and think what would I do if I were in this position? What would I do? He makes a impulsive choice, but it’s a strong choice and one that he jumps into. I think the most telling thing in the pilot is that he’s questioned by his cohorts as to why he’s doing this, and he just looks at them and says, “I’m alive.” I think he says, “I’m awake” or, “I’m alive.” Now I can’t remember.

ANDELMAN: “I’m awake.” I think that’s it.

GUNN: “I’m awake,” yes.

ANDELMAN: We should probably take a minute. You and I know what we’re talking about. There may be people listening who have maybe seen the full-page ads in the newspapers with Bryan Cranston, your co-star, and I’ll point out he was the dad in “Malcolm in the Middle,” standing in his underwear brandishing a gun out in, I guess, in New Mexico.

GUNN: Yes, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

ANDELMAN: He plays a guy who’s just not doing very well with life. Life is not treating him well. He’s a science teacher, and he’s working part-time at a car wash, and then he finds out he’s got terminal cancer.

GUNN: Right.

ANDELMAN: Have I summed that up?

GUNN: Yes, absolutely.

ANDELMAN: And now what’s the big twist that really pushes this series forward?

GUNN: He also has a son with cerebral palsy, and he has a wife who’s expecting their second child. He’s desperately trying to make ends meet, and he’s told that he has, at most, a couple of years to live. He wants to leave his family…He doesn’t want to leave them without anything. And, by chance, his brother-in-law leads him into the world of crystal meth on a ride-along because his brother-in-law’s a DEA agent. He sees the piles of money, first of all, on TV, then he’s taken on a ride-along, and he happens to see one of his ex-students who’s involved with this whole thing. The light bulb goes on in his head, and then he makes his decision that’s where he’s going to go. He’s a chemistry teacher. He’s a chemist, and, for him, it’s chemistry. It’s chemistry.

ANDELMAN: There’s never that moment, that moral moment, where he thinks, “Gee, this stuff would be bad for people.” It’s just, “I got a wife, I have a teen, I have a baby on the way, I haven’t been a very good provider to this point, but that’s gonna change now.”

GUNN: I believe so. As to what is going on internally for him in terms of morality, that’s the deepest question that’s going to be, I think, explored on the series. And in terms of everybody around him, in terms of the whole cast, I think everybody’s going to explore their own moral issues with it and with this kind of decision.



ANDELMAN: I watched on one of the HD channels, they have a little behind-the-scenes on the show, and there was a lot of joking about Bryan Cranston in his tighty-whities.

GUNN: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: I’m sure you want to say that the show is about more than him standing around in his underwear.

GUNN: Well, that’s a large part of the show up to this point, but, yes, there is more to the show than that, but that is an essential part. I have never seen such delight in a man running around in his underwear, and we all applaud his strength and courage. No, I’m kidding. Bryan’s willing to go wherever he needs to go for the role, and that’s the right thing to do. So he embraced it fully.

ANDELMAN: Maybe a little too fully.

GUNN: Hey, it’s alright. We should all be running around in our underwear by the end of it all.

ANDELMAN: I don’t expect you to actually answer this directly, but how long can he keep his secret of the terminal cancer?

GUNN: Oh, I thought you were going to say how long can he keep his underwear?

ANDELMAN: No, no. I’m not asking that.

GUNN: How long can he keep a secret of his cancer?

ANDELMAN: Yes.

GUNN: That’s to be explored in upcoming episodes, and I don’t want to ruin anything for viewers so I think I’ll let people discover that. But that’s one of the great questions. What is he going to do with that secret, and what is he going to do with his other secret? Those are things to be seen as the episodes unfold. It’s really exciting, actually, how those things reveal themselves.

ANDELMAN: Listeners who don’t know this, there’s a Mr. Media web chat that goes on simultaneous with the live interview, and we have a question from the web chat. Bebe’s asking: “Because your character, Skyler, is pregnant, time-wise, how do you feel that the pregnancy should play out?” I guess there’s about eight episodes shot for this first season.

GUNN: Yes, and the first season takes place over a relatively short period of time. So she’s progressing in her pregnancy, but it’s a slow progression because, in terms of the time, I’m not sure how everything’s going to play out, but I don’t think we’re going to go by leaps and bounds because he has a finite amount of time with his illness. And in terms of the pregnancy, I think we start out around month five, and we slowly progress through that in the first season.

ANDELMAN: You mentioned a few minutes ago that you’ve had a baby so maybe it’s not so bad to be wearing the baby suit.

GUNN: I’ve had two children. And yes, when I shot the pilot, I guess I’d had my baby five months before, actually, so it was all fresh in my mind. I went, “Oh, yeah, okay.” When it’s that fresh in your mind, it’s pretty easy to recall all the things that go along with it. And, yes, we just incorporated that into the costumes and into the whole story. So it’s fun. It’s fun to play that cause it’s an incredibly exciting time in somebody’s life when they’re pregnant so I love exploring that.

ANDELMAN: Has Gilligan tipped you off to why the character is pregnant? Isn’t the family, the husband, the wife, and the teen son with CP, isn’t that enough?

GUNN: Oh, I see what you’re saying. I think that, in our exploration of it, we thought most likely this was a surprise. This is one of those surprises that takes you in life, and it’s unexpected, but it’s really embraced and celebrated. And I think every pregnancy, everything brings along a certain amount of nervousness, and it’s equal parts nervousness, excitement, the unknown, but I think every person who has a child has that journey to take. So, yes.

ANDELMAN: One of the similarities I sort of see between your roles in “Breaking Bad” and “Deadwood” is that, on the surface, neither one of them is really a big role so you have to make the most of every moment of screen time. Is that true?

GUNN: That is true. It is, and it’s a really challenging thing because when you have just moments to reveal who you are, yes, you do. You need to look deeply into every scene and into every conversation that you’re having and figure out what it is that is being revealed by your character. And in “Deadwood,” it was a huge population that they were filming, and it was a really large cast, and so when we did have moments and scenes, yes, you did really have to figure out how to mind those experiences. And on “Breaking Bad,” the wonderful thing about both of these writers is that they understand in subtle ways and even with the most seemingly minute or everyday kind of scenarios, there is something being revealed about their relationships, about the people, and about where they are in their life just by the way they respond, by the looks they give, all of that. And it’s really explored by the directors as well. So it’s a wonderful…It’s a challenging thing definitely, but it’s a great thing to take that on.

ANDELMAN: There were three, I’m thinking, three scenes in the pilot where you have that kind of impact. The first is the surprise party for Bryan’s character, Walter, and he comes in, and you just kind of say in his ear, “You’re very late.”

GUNN: Yes.

ANDELMAN: We were wondering about that. My wife and I watched it, and I think we were both wondering the same thing: “Does she know that he works at the car wash?”

GUNN: Yes. Right at the beginning of the pilot when they’re sitting down to have breakfast, she said something about Bogdon -- Bogdon’s the guy who runs the car wash -- and she says, “I don’t want him keeping you late today. He’s supposed to let you out at a certain time so get out at a certain time,” and that’s her way of trying to make him on time for the party without letting him know. But, yes, she does know. She knows that he’s working a second job.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

GUNN: Yeah, she’s informed of that.



ANDELMAN: I missed that on the first play. I’m sure when we go back and see it again, which I’m sure we will, I’ll pick up on that and other things. And then the second one is you’re in the clothing store with your son on the show, and there’s some bullies at the other end of the store who are making fun of him and his condition, and you’re handling it as the mom, and you’re being protective and you want to do something because you don’t think that your husband is going to take care of this. So you have that moment there and then moments later, Bryan, as the dad, comes bursting into the front of the store and deals with this. And that’s another moment, it seems like, that you had that opportunity to really act, I guess.

GUNN: I think all moments are an opportunity to act and to explore something about the character, but absolutely in that moment, I think the wonderful dynamic going on is that you see, first of all, you see the way that we, as parents, deal with our son and that we try to allow him as much independence and freedom and let him get on with his life in the best way he can and that at a certain time, you have to step in as a parent. And you’re always trying to figure that out as a parent, how to maneuver your way through that. And she’s trying to keep her cool. She’s trying to keep a lid on it, but when it comes to your child, nobody’s gonna mess with that. And as a parent, you’re gonna do something. She’s ready to walk over there and kick some butt, but she’s interrupted. You see her starting to cross the store and going over to them, and you wonder, “Ooh, what’s gonna go on?” And she’s not scared of them. There’s a whole group of them. She’s not scared. And it’s the way, I think, any parent would react if their child were in that situation. And it’s a complete and utter surprise to her that, all of a sudden, Walt comes in and does what he does. She’s never, ever seen that side of him come out. Never.

ANDELMAN: And that leads us to the third instance that I’m thinking of which is at the very end. He’s just lived this life that you still know nothing about. He’s been out cooking up crystal meth in the desert, and he’s had a whole thing with guns and all this kind of stuff. He comes to bed, and you’re both staring up at the ceiling. You say something, and he just kind of looks at you, and then you two start having sex, I assume.

GUNN: Correct.

ANDELMAN: And it reminded me of some of those moments, actually, back to “Deadwood” because the relationship between Bullock, the sheriff, and his unplanned new wife is very tentative and very awkward when we start to see them being physical. And it’s like, “Who is this person?”

GUNN: Right.

ANDELMAN: “Where did you come from?”

GUNN: Right. And I love that. Both of those situations with “Deadwood,” certainly, with that situation, she was married to Sheriff Bullock’s brother, and they are really strangers to each other. So when she comes into town and they address each other as “Mr. Bullock” and “Mrs. Bullock,” they’re doing that, first of all, because of the time that that was, and that actually wasn’t an uncommon thing for married couples to call themselves by that formal of a title, but especially in their case, that’s all they knew to say to each other. They didn’t know each other. And then they have to set up house together, and they’re both doing the best they can. And they’re living, also, with a ghost -- the ghost of the brother between them, but they’re tentatively, slowly making their way toward each other. And my disappointment with that was that you never get to fully see where they could go, where they could end up because I think they’re two people on their way to really falling in love in a marriage, which is a wonderful thing to explore.



But with “Breaking Bad,” these are two people, I believe, that deeply love each other, they always have, but have gotten into routine and habit and various things along the way that people get into. And then suddenly, there are shades of a person. In terms of Skyler watching Walt, she’s seeing shades of him that she’s never seen before, and she’s confused. She doesn’t know where it’s coming from. What is he out doing? Why has his behavior changed so much? And, of course, probably one of the first things that somebody goes to is, “Is he having an affair? What is he doing?” And all of a sudden, he turns to her with such passion and such vigor, and it’s something that she hasn’t…I think probably in the early days they experienced a modicum of that, maybe not a modicum, maybe a lot of it, but they haven’t experienced it in a long time, and she is completely taken by surprise and delight.

ANDELMAN: Yes, you could see. And I think you get the last word in that pilot episode.

GUNN: Yes. “Walt, is that you?” That’s right. She means that in every sense of the word.

ANDELMAN: And, of course, “Walt, is that you?” because, of course, earlier in the day, it was the pool boy.

GUNN: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: No, no, no, no.

GUNN: “Oh my God, who is that? Oh, it’s you. That’s right. I thought it was the gardener.”

ANDELMAN: Yes, there were a couple ways to go with that.

GUNN: That’s right. That’s right. But yeah, I think that that’s the wonderful…It’s also wonderful when you get to see a married couple and a pregnant woman especially, and I just love this about the way they’re writing the character is sometimes on TV, you don’t see pregnant women being portrayed as sexual women, as women who are women. And they do portray her that way, and I love that because it’s real, because it’s just honest and real.

ANDELMAN: Of course, there are married men and women who are going through having a child or the wife is pregnant, and they don’t know quite how to handle a woman’s sexuality while she’s pregnant. So, yeah, I could see it could be an awkward thing on TV, as well, where things are not always as they might be.

GUNN: Right.

Click Here to Keep Reading!

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.