Bryan Cranston has spoken in defense of his Breaking Bad character’s wife Skyler White — and her actress Anna Gunn — after criticism from his Malcolm in the Middle co-star Frankie Muniz.
During an episode of Hot Ones, Muniz told Cranston that he was one of the many, many Breaking Bad fans to dislike Skyler for being an obstacle in her schoolteacher husband’s path towards becoming a meth-cooking drug kingpin. This fan opinion is nothing new, and both Cranston and Breaking Bad show creator Vince Gilligan have spoken repeatedly in the past about their surprise at the level of online vitriol aimed at the character of Skyler, and at Gunn for her portrayal.
“I wanted to kill Skyler, to make your life easier,” Muniz told Cranston. “Your life would have been so much easier,” he continued. “You were such a bad guy, you could have gotten rid of her, all she did was complain. Look at the money!”
“Now, see, she got a lot of blowback from that,” Cranston responded. “Well, first of all, Anna Gunn is a superb actor, but she got: ‘Oh, why don’t you get off his back?'”
“That’s how I felt,” Muniz said.
“Wait a minute,” Cranston countered. “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 what…”
Writing in an article for The New York Times back in 2013 following Breaking Bad’s finale, Gunn said she had been honored to play the role of Skyler over the series, but had also been troubled by the backlash to her character on social media, calling it “frankly, misogynistic” and that it had “become alarming when it turned violent.”
“Back when the show first aired, Skyler was roundly disliked,” Gilligan himself said in 2022, in a profile for the New Yorker. “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.”
Unlike Cranston and numerous other members of the Breaking Bad cast, Gunn did not return to cameo in the show’s subsequent prequel series Better Call Saul. Meanwhile, Cranston and Muniz are now back together as father and son in Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, which is airing new episodes on Disney+.
Last week, Muniz set the record straight on the details of his bad memory, after previously suggesting he couldn’t remember shooting much of the original Malcolm in the Middle — something he has now said was “taken out of context.”
Images credit: Theo Wargo/Getty Images and Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
