Bryan Cranston has defended Breaking Bad‘s Skyler White following fan backlash to the character.
His on-screen wife was played by Anna Gunn, and received a hostile reception from some fans over the years, which many viewers found strange, given it was her husband who turned from chemistry teacher to drug kingpin.
Speaking with Malcolm In The Middle co-star Frankie Muniz on Hot Ones Versus amid the comedy show’s new revival, the former expressed his dislike of the character.
“I loved Breaking Bad, obviously everyone in the whole world loved it. I wanted to kill Skyler to make your life easier,” Muniz said. “You were such a bad guy, you could’ve just gotten rid of her. All she did was complain.”
However, Cranston defended Skyler, saying in response: “Now, see, she got a lot of blowback from that. Well, first of all, Anna Gunn is a superb actor, but she got, ‘Oh, why don’t you get off his back?’ Wait a minute.
“Let me understand this. Her husband leaves without any explanation, she’s pregnant, he’s making crystal methamphetamine and people have died. And she’s the bitch? Like, we couldn’t understand.”
“When you put it that way, I guess,” Muniz replied.
Gunn previously took out an op-ed in the New York Times in 2013 in which she noted that her character had “become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non submissive, ill-treated women”.
In 2018, she called the backlash to Skyler “very bizarre” and “confusing to us all”, adding to Entertainment Weekly: “It was a combination of sexism, ideas about gender roles, and then honestly, it was the brilliance of the construct of the show.
“People did find a hero in Walt, but they wanted so much to connect with him so viscerally that to see the person who often was his antagonist – therefore the show’s antagonist in a way – they felt like she was in the way of him doing whatever he wanted to do, and that he should be allowed to do what he wanted to do.”
Show creator Vince Gilligan also discussed the sexist backlash to Skyler a few years later, telling The New Yorker: “Back when the show first aired, Skyler was roundly disliked. I think that always troubled Anna Gunn.
“And I can tell you it always troubled me, because Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve that. And Anna certainly did nothing to deserve that. She played the part beautifully.”