I can only show you this ’cause you’ve seen the film,” Aaron Paul says, grinning proudly as he scrolls through hundreds — maybe thousands? — of photos featuring his 19-month-old daughter, Story. He settles on a short video of the two of them taken during a break in the filming of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. The clip finds the actor in full makeup as Jesse Pinkman, the emotionally pulverized, physically lacerated meth-maker. As Paul gently describes to Story the harrowing (and very top-secret) El Camino scene he has just filmed, his daughter gazes at her father’s bruised and grubby face with affection. “She’s totally fine when she sees Jesse’s scars,” Paul says, putting down his phone. “She looks past all of that and right into my eyes.”
It’s less than a month before the release of El Camino, and the 40-year-old Paul is sitting on the back terrace of his Los Feliz home, dressed in a beige linen shirt and matching slacks. A red Radio Flyer wagon — piloted by a lone teddy bear — is parked nearby at the foot of an immense artificial waterfall that cascades down an entire hillside. The nearly 100-year-old estate has been home to several Hollywood dignitaries over the years — including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Parsons, and Twilight-era Robert Pattinson — and is anchored by a lush, panoramic garden so large Paul is still sorting through every plant. “When we moved in,” he says, “they gave us two binders of information about running this place.”
Paul and his wife, the anti-bullying-nonprofit founder Lauren Parsekian, took over the estate earlier this year, not long after a family trip to New Mexico. That’s where Paul had spent several months covertly reprising the role of Jesse, last seen in Breaking Bad’s 2013 conclusion. In his final onscreen moments, Jesse plows through the gates of a desert compound in a stolen El Camino, sobbing and howling after having escaped not only his Aryan Brotherhood captors but also the emotional clutches of his mentor turned manipulator, Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston.
For those who’d come to root for Jesse, the send-off felt victorious. But it also left some questions in the balance. Ever since the finale, Paul notes, “people always ask, ‘What happened to Jesse? Is he okay?’ And I’d say, ‘You know as much as I do.’ ”
Written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, El Camino, which debuts on Netflix on October 11, begins right after the massacre in the show’s finale, which left Walter dead and tipped off police to the vast drug empire Jesse had helped build. The movie is deeply satisfying on its own, featuring all the twists and pivots of a gnarly, on-the-run thriller; but for Breaking Bad devotees, there’s the added emotional investment of having watched (and worried about) Jesse Pinkman for five seasons. El Camino also pairs Paul with several of his former Breaking Bad cronies, though to name them, or to reveal even the haziest plot points, would violate Netflix’s demands of secrecy. Suffice it to say that many of the show’s hallmarks — revelatory flashbacks, grisly humor, and abrupt violence — are still very much in effect in El Camino.
Still, it gives away nothing to note that the sole focus of El Camino is Jesse Pinkman, whose heartaches and fears were like psychological open wounds made visible through Paul’s fidgety physicality and sad, searching eyes. “I couldn’t be more opposite of that guy,” notes the actor, “other than the fact that I wear my heart on my sleeve. I don’t bury anything.” That on-the-surface rawness made for one of the more intensely symbiotic performances on television (while also earning Paul a trio of Emmys during Breaking Bad’s run). So much so that, in the years after the show ended, Paul himself wondered what had become of his troubled old friend. “He was real to me,” the actor says. “I loved Jesse. I cared for him. I wanted him to be okay.” (...)
It’s possible, of course, that the traits that make Paul such a transfixing TV presence are too nuanced for the big screen: For all of Jesse’s spaz-outs and “bitch”-snaps, Paul carries much of the character’s pain and (minimal) joy in his face — the kind of subtle gestures that work best within the intimacy of a prime-time drama. There’s also the fact that Jesse has never actually gone away, since Breaking Bad is effectively in a state of perpetual reruns on Netflix. Television actors — even those with multiple Emmys — have always struggled to navigate the gulf between TV and film. That’s all the more difficult when your best-known character is being rediscovered on a daily basis.
by Brian Raftery, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA by Getty Images
It’s less than a month before the release of El Camino, and the 40-year-old Paul is sitting on the back terrace of his Los Feliz home, dressed in a beige linen shirt and matching slacks. A red Radio Flyer wagon — piloted by a lone teddy bear — is parked nearby at the foot of an immense artificial waterfall that cascades down an entire hillside. The nearly 100-year-old estate has been home to several Hollywood dignitaries over the years — including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Parsons, and Twilight-era Robert Pattinson — and is anchored by a lush, panoramic garden so large Paul is still sorting through every plant. “When we moved in,” he says, “they gave us two binders of information about running this place.”Paul and his wife, the anti-bullying-nonprofit founder Lauren Parsekian, took over the estate earlier this year, not long after a family trip to New Mexico. That’s where Paul had spent several months covertly reprising the role of Jesse, last seen in Breaking Bad’s 2013 conclusion. In his final onscreen moments, Jesse plows through the gates of a desert compound in a stolen El Camino, sobbing and howling after having escaped not only his Aryan Brotherhood captors but also the emotional clutches of his mentor turned manipulator, Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston.
For those who’d come to root for Jesse, the send-off felt victorious. But it also left some questions in the balance. Ever since the finale, Paul notes, “people always ask, ‘What happened to Jesse? Is he okay?’ And I’d say, ‘You know as much as I do.’ ”
Written and directed by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, El Camino, which debuts on Netflix on October 11, begins right after the massacre in the show’s finale, which left Walter dead and tipped off police to the vast drug empire Jesse had helped build. The movie is deeply satisfying on its own, featuring all the twists and pivots of a gnarly, on-the-run thriller; but for Breaking Bad devotees, there’s the added emotional investment of having watched (and worried about) Jesse Pinkman for five seasons. El Camino also pairs Paul with several of his former Breaking Bad cronies, though to name them, or to reveal even the haziest plot points, would violate Netflix’s demands of secrecy. Suffice it to say that many of the show’s hallmarks — revelatory flashbacks, grisly humor, and abrupt violence — are still very much in effect in El Camino.
Still, it gives away nothing to note that the sole focus of El Camino is Jesse Pinkman, whose heartaches and fears were like psychological open wounds made visible through Paul’s fidgety physicality and sad, searching eyes. “I couldn’t be more opposite of that guy,” notes the actor, “other than the fact that I wear my heart on my sleeve. I don’t bury anything.” That on-the-surface rawness made for one of the more intensely symbiotic performances on television (while also earning Paul a trio of Emmys during Breaking Bad’s run). So much so that, in the years after the show ended, Paul himself wondered what had become of his troubled old friend. “He was real to me,” the actor says. “I loved Jesse. I cared for him. I wanted him to be okay.” (...)
It’s possible, of course, that the traits that make Paul such a transfixing TV presence are too nuanced for the big screen: For all of Jesse’s spaz-outs and “bitch”-snaps, Paul carries much of the character’s pain and (minimal) joy in his face — the kind of subtle gestures that work best within the intimacy of a prime-time drama. There’s also the fact that Jesse has never actually gone away, since Breaking Bad is effectively in a state of perpetual reruns on Netflix. Television actors — even those with multiple Emmys — have always struggled to navigate the gulf between TV and film. That’s all the more difficult when your best-known character is being rediscovered on a daily basis.
by Brian Raftery, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA by Getty Images
