One of the main reasons why Vince Gilligan’s seminal show Breaking Bad is so beloved by critics and fans everywhere is because it boasted one the most impressive ensemble casts of any show.
There were no small characters or performances in the ground-breaking series because every actor seemed like they had an integral role to play in Walter and Jesse’s rise from small-time wannabes into meth kingpins. Yeah b*tch!
Spoiler alert but it was widely rumoured that Vince Gilligan planned on killing off Jesse before the WGA writers’ strike of 2007-08 intervened, but on a recent podcast with actor Kevin Pollak, Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan has said that Hank was more likely to meet his maker in one of those two episodes that were axed on the backend of the first season, because the writers caused havoc with scheduling.
Gilligan says “we were writing and shooting and editing in a vacuum, no-one had seen the show yet, and I really had the feeling that I needed to throw the kitchen sink at it, that the writers and I needed to get every bit of drama… The writers’ strike came along and we didn’t get to do our last two episodes… Our ninth episode that year, we were seriously leaning toward killing off Hank.”
Could you imagine what the show would be like without Hank though? That scene in the desert would never have happened or the moment when the penny finally drops and he realises who Heisenberg is.
We don’t want to live in a world like that. Thank god then this didn’t happen and Hank lived happily ever after, didn’t he?
