Ben Rothstein/Netflix; Inset: Ursula Coyote/AMC
The story of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman seemed to wrap up when the AMC series Breaking Bad concluded after five seasons in 2013. A prequel series, Better Call Saul, was launched in 2015, but it turns out creator Vince Gilligan was hoping there was more of Jesse’s story to tell and had been thinking about it even before he finished Breaking Bad. “I didn’t really tell anybody about it, because I wasn’t sure I would ever do anything with it,” he told THR. “But I started thinking to myself, ‘What happened to Jesse?’ You see him driving away. And to my mind, he went off to a happy ending. But as the years progressed, I thought, ‘What did that ending — let’s just call it an ending, neither happy, nor sad — what did it look like?’ ”
In 2018, while planning events tied to the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Breaking Bad, Gilligan told his inner circle about the idea. Gilligan, who wrote and directed the project, brought back Aaron Paul to star as Jesse, and much of the original cast, including Jesse Plemons, Robert Forster, Jonathan Banks, Krysten Ritter and Bryan Cranston, to reprise their roles as well. They filmed in secret (under the title Greenbrier) in Albuquerque in late 2018, and the project wasn’t revealed until August 2019, when Netflix dropped the trailer. It was released both on Netflix and in theaters Oct. 11. At the time, Paul told THR: “It was so easy for me to just jump into where Jesse’s at mentally, emotionally, because I lived and breathed everything he went through and then some.”
RSS