Ever since Breaking Bad introduced fans to prototypical anti-hero (and let’s be honest, eventual villain) Walter White, two-time Emmy-winning actress Anna Gunn, who plays his wife Skyler, has had to contend with a legion of sexist fans villainizing her.
The conversation was broached again recently during a “Hot Ones Versus” with Malcolm in the Middle co-stars Bryan Cranston and Frankie Muniz.
“I love Breaking Bad,” the latter said, before gritting his teeth and continuing, “I wanted to kill Skyler.” Cranston’s jaw dropped as Muniz added: “To make your life easier; your life would have been so much easier. You were such a bad guy, you could have just gotten rid of her. All she did was complain.”
Cranston — whose portrayal of Walt, a high school chemistry teacher who turns to drug manufacturing to pay for expensive cancer treatment, led to four Emmy wins — defended the character, and subsequently, Gunn.
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“She got a lot of blowback from that,” he said. “Well, first of all, Anna Gunn is a superb actor, but she got, like, ‘Oh, why don’t you get off his back?’”
“Well, that’s how I felt,” Muniz responded.
“Wait a minute, 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 why,” Cranston said, alluding to show creator Vince Gilligan.
A juggernaut of the prestige television era, Breaking Bad would go on to be nominated for 58 Emmys throughout its five-season run from 2008 through 2013, winning 16 statuettes. The crime drama series also spawned the equally beloved Bob Odenkirk vehicle Better Call Saul, which clinched 53 Emmy nods but did not receive any awards during its run from 2015 to 2022.
Since the show’s conclusion, Gilligan and Gunn have addressed the immense backlash Skyler received.
“Back when the show first aired, Skyler was roundly disliked,” Gilligan told The New Yorker in 2022. “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.”
The Pluribus creator conceded that, “in hindsight,” he recognized the show was “rigged,” as the story follows Walt’s perspective. “Even Gus [played by Giancarlo Esposito], his archenemy, didn’t suffer the animosity Skyler received. It’s a weird thing. I’m still thinking about it all these years later.
Gunn wrote about being “unprepared for the vitriolic response” her character, and as a result, she, prompted among viewers, with some even commenting that they hoped to “find her so I can kill her.”
“I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives,” she said in a New York Times op-ed the year the series ended. “Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”