Bryan Cranston Almost Axed Breaking Bad's Iconic Opening Scene
Breaking Bad has one of the most iconic opening scenes in the history of TV shows, but it could've been different since Bryan Cranston almost cut out one crucial detail.
If you saw it once, you'll never forget the opening sequence of Breaking Bad.
An RV rushing through the New Mexican desert; distressed Walter White behind the wheel in nothing but a gas mask and his tighty-whiteys; two dead bodies rolling in the back of the RV; and the approaching sounds of the police sirens... That's definitely a sequence to remember, especially when at the end, Walter gets ready to face the cops.
A gun in his hand, desperate decisiveness on his face, and the iconic tighty-whiteys on his...yeah.
This scene is so iconic not just for what went down in it but for how it went down. The otherwise serious and grim circumstances are brilliantly diluted by surreal details that don't really match our default cop chase expectations: the RV and the middle-aged man in tighty-whiteys don't exactly fit in this scenario, do they?
This is the genius of Breaking Bad's opening sequence, and this is what made it so iconic: the bizarre details that don't mix with the context at first but begin to make sense later. And apparently, Bryan Cranston almost axed the most crucial of these bizarre details: his character's tighty-whities!
"The tighty-whitey underwear was actually in the script. And initially, I was going to change it, because I had done that on Malcolm In The Middle... [But] the more I thought about it, the more I realized, 'You know, this works in an oddly different way than it did on Malcolm,' so I kept it," the actor shared with The A.V. Club.
Apart from that, Cranston also explained that he recognized the importance of this underwear in shaping his character. According to him, the formless tighty-whities revealed just how bland and boring Walter White used to be in the beginning of his criminal journey.
"No color to him at all! Who makes a fashion statement of the tightey-whitey underwear?" Cranston joked.
The fact that the actor realized the significance of this exact underwear for the scene and changed his mind was partially what made the opening sequence of Breaking Bad so brilliant and iconic... So this only goes to show how important it is to back down on your decision if you find it wrong in the process.
Source: The A.V. Club