Bryan Cranston is defending his on-screen wife from his on-screen son!
The 70-year-old Breaking Bad alum went head-to-head with his Malcolm in the Middle co-star Frankie Muniz for a new installment of Hot One Versus to promote the Hulu reboot.
One of the question cards asks Bryan whether he prefers his Malcolm in the Middle wife Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) or Skyler (Anna Gunn). He chooses Lois purely from a character point-of-view, but then Frankie cuts in with a divisive opinion.
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“Can I tell you an honest truth?” Frankie started. “I loved Breaking Bad. Obviously, everyone in the whole world loved it. I wanted to kill Skyler to make your life easier.”
Bryan immediately let his jaw drop to show his surprise, even as the younger actor continued, saying, “You were such a bad guy. You could have just gotten rid of her. All she did was complain. Look at the money.”
Bryan then came to Skyler’s defense, as well as actress Anna Gunn‘s, noting that she “got a lot of blowback from that.”
“Well, first of all, Anna Gun is a superb actor,” he said. “But she got like, ‘Oh, why don’t you get off his back?’”
“That’s how I felt,” Frankie chimed in.
“Wait a minute. Let me understand this,” Bryan said. “Her husband leaves without any explanation. She’s pregnant. He’s making crystal methamphetamine and people have died and she’s the b—h? Like, we couldn’t understand.”
A seemingly chastened Frankie relents a little bit to say, “When you put it that way, I guess.”
Bryan is correct in that there was a ton of vitriol aimed at Skyler while Breaking Bad was airing and discourse surrounding the character has persisted even a decade after it wrapped.
In August 2013, Anna even wrote an op-ed in The New York Times aimed at Skyler haters, calling her a “a kind of Rorschach test for society.”
“As an actress, I realize that viewers are entitled to have whatever feelings they want about the characters they watch. But as a human being, I’m concerned that so many people react to Skyler with such venom,” Anna wrote at the time. “Could it be that they can’t stand a woman who won’t suffer silently or ‘stand by her man’? That they despise her because she won’t back down or give up? Or because she is, in fact, Walter’s equal?”
She also called attention to some of the hatred at aimed at other “complex TV wives” like Carmela Soprano of The Sopranos and Betty Draper of Mad Men.
In 2024, Anna reflected on how the perception of Skyler has changed and developed over the years.
