Anna Gunn; Breaking Bad Season 3 Gag Reel
- Sean T. Collins: There's been a backlash against Skyler, something she has in common with women characters on a variety of big dramas about men who tend behave much worse than they do. Do you have a sense of why this happens? Does it faze you at all?
- Anna Gunn: Some of it is still the double standard in our society – that it’s more acceptable for a man to be this antihero badass doing all these things that break the law or are really awful. People watching want to be Walt, or they identify with him. He doesn’t have to answer to anybody. He does what he wants. There’s a fantasy element to that, I think. I also think that in some ways, there’s kind of a sexism to it, honestly. Sometimes . . . [pauses] I’ve been told particularly, how do you say . . . non-flattering or just really vicious – you could use the word vitriolic – angry stuff about Skyler, or about other female characters on other shows. The hatred and the vitriol and the venom and the nastiness and the attacks are so personal sometimes that it feels like, "Oh gosh, OK, I get that you don’t like Skyler, you like Walt, you’re on his side, but it just feels different." I don’t feel like that stuff would be written about a male character. Honestly, Skyler is sometimes the biggest impediment to Walt doing whatever he wants. For the people who love Heisenberg, who love the badass Walt, when Skyler says, "No, you shouldn’t do that," they’re like, "What is her deal!? What’s wrong with her?" [Laughs] I can understand that. I can. But having looked at articles that cite other female characters being attacked like this, I find it disturbing just in terms of a cultural phenomenon. I'm not saying everyone who's into the show and has an opinion is like that, but I feel there's an element of that in there, and it's an interesting gender issue. I'm glad that people are talking about it.
“Gunn said production for the fifth season of “Breaking Bad” will start this month, with eight episodes slated to shoot. The highly anticipated final season will be broken into two shortened mini-seasons. The last batch of episodes will probably shoot in winter 2013, she said.”
“Everything that she thought she knew to be the truth isn’t the truth anymore. So what does a person do with that? And how does the relationship survive that? She thought the worst thing would be that he was having an affair, and to discover that it’s this… I’m fascinated by the idea of thinking that you know somebody, that you think maybe something’s wrong, but never— How could somebody in their wildest dreams imagine that their partner would be doing this? He’s sort of every man who goes on his journey, and she’s every woman, and what does she do with this now? What choices does she make?” —Anna Gunn
25th Annual Television Critics Association Awards ↩ July 30, 2009
The Cast of Breaking Bad at the premiere screening of show’s fourth season
