Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul can’t say which series alum he might reunite with when Jesse Pinkman returns in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, but Paul teased fans of the show will be “really happy” with what they see.
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A trailer debuted by Netflix Saturday shows Pinkman’s friend Skinny Pete (Charles Baker) telling the police he “doesn’t have a clue” where the wanted Pinkman fled. Even if he did, he says, “No way I’m helping you people put Jesse Pinkman back inside a cage.”
But Skinny Pete may not be the only returning Breaking Bad character.
“All I can say, I think people will be really happy with what they see,” Paul told The New York Times when asked if the Netflix original movie could include appearances from Breaking Bad co-stars Bryan Cranston, Bob Odenkirk, Krysten Ritter or Jonathan Banks.
Of those four, only Odenkirk’s slimy lawyer Saul Goodman made it out of the series alive — Odenkirk now headlines spinoff series Better Call Saul — but because the Breaking Bad universe frequently engages in nonlinear storytelling, it’s possible the on-the-run Pinkman flashes back to his tenure as the sometimes unwilling meth-cooking partner of Cranston’s Walter “Heisenberg” White.
Pinkman parted ways with his former high school teacher one last time before the crime lord collapsed and died in the Breaking Bad series finale, “Felina,” which ended with Pinkman screeching to freedom behind the wheel of a 1978 Chevrolet El Camino.
Paul thought that was it for his time as underachiever-turned-meth cook Jesse Pinkman. “It was a hard, emotional thing for all of us,” Paul said of his core cast of co-stars. “And when the finale happened, we all got together and hugged it out and said I love you. And that was it.”
Roughly two years ago, Paul took a call from series creator Vince Gilligan. “At the very end of the conversation, he mentioned that he had an idea of where to take it from here, and he wanted to hear my thoughts on it,” Paul said. “I quickly told Vince that I would follow him into a fire.”
Upon finishing his read-through of the script, “I couldn’t speak for a good 30, 60 seconds,” Paul said. “I was just lost in my thoughts. As the guy who played the guy, I was so happy that Vince wanted to take me on this journey.”
The project, developed under working title Greenbrier, quickly came together under writer-director Gilligan. El Camino was so secretive the press only learned of its existence after Gilligan and crew had completed filming.
“The movie had already happened and was in the can,” he said. “It was done.” To keep it quiet, Paul would say only he was working on a “small little indie out in New Mexico,” and “no one second-guessed” his fibs. “I definitely had people asking, ‘Are you doing Better Call Saul?’ And I’d go, ‘Hey, man, I wish I was. But they’re on hiatus right now.’”
Though Paul couldn’t give away Cranston’s level of involvement — if he’s involved at all, whether that be through flashback, dream sequence or hallucination — Cranston has frequently flirted with the idea of revisiting Breaking Bad.
“Well, rigor mortis has a way of allowing that to happen,” Cranston quipped in June when ET asked if his Heisenberg could “pop up” in the movie. “It could be! Could be [in] a flashback, or a flash forward. I’m still dead, Walter White, I don’t know what [could happen].”
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie premieres October 11 on Netflix and will later air on AMC, the original network home of Breaking Bad.
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