“He was real to me,” says Aaron Paul. “I loved Jesse. I cared for him. I wanted him to be okay.”
Photo: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA by Getty Images “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.
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 Jesse Pinkman for five seasons.
During the show’s early seasons — before Cranston taught him how to mellow a bit — Paul treated the role as a 24-hour-a-day assignment. He’d sometimes lurk around Albuquerque late at night, investigating the city’s darker corners in order to understand Jesse’s world and mind-set. At times, Paul even dreamed as Jesse. ”It sounds odd, but I lived and breathed every moment of his life,” says Paul. “I know him so well it feels like these things happened to me, in a way.
He found it hard to leverage his TV success into a film career. “I was so spoiled at the height of Breaking Bad,” he says. “I was being offered everything.” Paul landed his first leading-man role in the race-car drama Need for Speed and worked with Ridley Scott on the swordplay epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, but neither connected with U.S. audiences.
Over the next several months, Gilligan worked on the script for what would become El Camino, occasionally sending Paul a screenshot of a work-in-progress page. Finally, in early 2018, the actor visited Gilligan’s office, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out on a couch for almost three hours, slowly reading the El Camino script. “When I flipped the last page, I just laid there in silence.” From the moment Gilligan had told him about the film, he’d been eager to learn Jesse’s fate.
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