‘A Very Breaking Bad Christmas?’ No chance, says star Bryan Cranston

For 62 one-hour episodes between 2008 and 2013, the critically exalted American neo-Western crime drama Breaking Bad was the apotheosis of golden age TV. But the show’s stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are clear on one thing: there is no holiday special coming to brighten the show’s dark finish.

“If [creator] Vince Gilligan [came to us] and said, I’ve got an idea, ‘A Very Breaking Bad Christmas’, I would say, ‘you need to lie down. I’m not doing it, and I need to take care of you because something’s wrong’. Can you imagine?” Cranston says, laughing.

“And it’s important for human beings not to be so sentimental about leaving something so that it allows space to move into something else,” Cranston adds. “That’s our lives. It’s cyclical. We have to end something in order for something new to begin, but yet the sentiment tends to have people go, ‘but wouldn’t you love to go back?’”

“It ended so beautifully, you don’t want to mess with that,” Paul says. “It’s perfect, the way it was.”

Yet, 13 years later, we may have closed the chapter on the series, about a high school chemistry teacher who, after being diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer, turns his home into a methamphetamine lab, in cahoots with one of his former students, in order to secure his family’s financial security, but we cannot seem to quite close the book.

Cranston and Paul are heading to Australia for “an unscripted evening with two men, five years of behind-the-scenes stories, and a lifelong friendship”. Think of it as a slide night crossed with a TED Talk. Punctuated by reflections on a TV shows which still regularly tops “best of all time” audience polls.

The format of that kind of touring show, while not unfamiliar to an Australian audience who have grown accustomed to the TED Talk-style touring show – similar tours have been undertaken by artists as varied as John Cleese and Eric Idle, Brian Blessed, Carrie Fisher and The Goodies – it is a relatively new genre for a pair of American TV actors.

“We want to bring a very entertaining evening,” says Cranston. “We have a lot of stories personally and together, and we have some ideas … to present some really fun moments, showing some clips and doing a couple of crazy things. We want the audience to leave every night after a show and go, oh man, that was fantastic. That’s our job.”

While the original Breaking Bad series is not strictly seen as a franchise, at least in Law & Order terms or scale, it did spawn shot-for-shot Spanish language remake Metástasis, the six-season prequel/sequel Better Call Saul (2015–2022), a feature-length epilogue El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) written and directed by Vince Gilligan and starring Paul, and the somewhat curious six-part animated short-form series Slippin’ Jimmy (2022), about young Jimmy McGill.

The biggest takeaway for Cranston and Paul, however, has been an enduring friendship which formed in the infancy of the series. “When you’re doing a project, it feels like you’re going away on a sleep away summer camp,” Paul says. “You hope for the best. You hope that you connect with some of these kids.

“Am I going to make friends? Or am I going to be the person that’s in the corner not talking to anybody? And sometimes you’re like, I’m going to be friends with these people forever, but then you go back to your day-to-day lives and life takes a hold of you,” Paul adds.

Cranston was “the greatest leader on a set you could ever wish for,” Paul says. “He’s the hardest worker, but he loves to have a good time while doing so. We quickly realised we have the same work ethic. We come ready, we come prepared, we’re ready to do the work. We’re not going to mess this up. We’re going to give it our all.”

That off-screen chemistry has also been parlayed into an independent artisanal mezcal brand, Dos Hombres. Stars with an alcohol product is something of a crowded genre. George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey both have tequilas, Ryan Reynolds has a gin. Brad Pitt, and Kylie Minogue, for that matter, both have rosés.

Is bottle-in-your-back-pocket politics completive in LA, I ask them both. Paul answers, diplomatically. “I don’t feel that,” he says. “We just know how we do the work. This was all self-funded. This was our brainchild. It wasn’t an operation that came to us asking us if we wanted to make a quick buck. We just focus on the dedication to the work.”

And while the original series itself was fairly wild, even by cable TV standards, and it came in for some criticism for turning drug manufacturers into storybook heroes – “I always saw the show as … poor choices made by human beings at any given part of their lives,” Cranston says – it also made some surprising observations on the world, at least in American terms.

“It illuminated the deficiency in the healthcare system that we have in the United States,” Cranston says. “The fact that teachers are not paid what they should be paid and my character needing a second job, it’s shameful really, in that sense on those two issues.”

The immortality of the show too, while not wholly surprising – its significance was clear as it started to pop in the cultural zeitgeist during its second season – has been something of a longer-arc surprise to the two actors. In Australia, in a similar fashion to another critical TV masterpiece The Wire, its early popularity was bolstered by sales of DVD boxed sets, when digital hard media fuelled a collector boom.

“It just keeps surprising us,” Paul says. “We always knew it was special; the moment we landed on Netflix it just exploded globally. Brian won best actor Emmy from doing seven episodes of the first season. The critics really praised us from day one, and then Netflix kind of changed the game.”

Cranston likens it to becoming a parent for the first time. “You don’t really know what it’s going to be like,” he says. “When we were making the show, we just knew that it was really well written and if we didn’t screw it up, that we might have a chance to make a good show. Then it became something bigger than any of us could imagine.”

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul will tour Australia and New Zealand in January 2027. Tickets go on sale September 30. For more information, see fane.com.au/cranstonandpaul.

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