Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad Universe Ending: “It’s Okay” to “Let It Go”

Bryan Cranston is putting the brakes on more Breaking Bad. In an interview for his new movie Argylle, the Walter White actor responded to Better Call Saul ending after six seasons — the final chapter of the Breaking Bad Universe that began with the first season of the Vince Gilligan-created crime drama in 2008. The Emmy-winning Breaking Bad ran for five seasons and aired 62 episodes, spawning the prequel spinoff series Better Call Saul and the sequel movie El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

“Everything should come to an end. Everything is cyclical — our lives, seasons, trees, everything,” Cranston told ET. “And so it’s okay to have a beginning, middle, and end, and then let it go. I’m proud of what we did.” 

Cranston played a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher who turns to manufacturing and selling meth with a former student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to leave a nest egg for his family. He reprised his role for a flashback sequence in El Camino and episodes of Better Call Saul‘s final season, and most recently returned to his role as drug kingpin Heisenbergfor a 2023 Super Bowl commercial. 

In October, Gilligan said another series set in the BBU is unlikely — unless his next show, an untitled Apple TV+ sci-fi series also set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, flops.

“To be brutally honest, if I get my ass handed to me with this nextshow and the one after that, and nobody wants to see it and everybodywants Breaking Bad, who knows! Maybe we’ll see our way clearerto doing something in the future. But what I’d like to do is leave itbe,” Gilligan told Variety. “It’s the work of my lifetime — Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul— it’ll be the first thing engraved on my tombstone, and I couldn’t bemore proud of it. And I kind of wonder if there are further stories totell, but I don’t want to beat a dead horse.”

Gilligan continued,”I look around and see other storytelling worlds — I’m not going toname names — that feel like, ‘Boy, they are really sucking that lastdime out of that franchise.’ I’d hate to see that happen with this. I’drather err on the side of leaving the party too soon than too late. Butnever say never. That’s just how I feel right now, but who knows downthe line.”

Argylle is in theaters February 2.