Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul opens up about returning for the film

Aaron Paul has said he agreed to reprise his role for the Breaking Bad film because he would follow creator Vince Gilligan “into a fire”.

The actor played Jesse Pinkman in the hit television series and said when the show wrapped in 2013 he “thought it was goodbye and I was OK with that”.

Then in 2018, Gilligan told him he had decided to continue the story in Breaking Bad film El Camino.

Paul told The Hollywood Reporter of his thoughts at the time: “I’m like everybody else on the planet — I think Vince and the rest of the writers really nailed the landing with the ending of Breaking Bad, and why mess with that?

“But it’s Vince we’re talking about. I would follow Vince into a fire. That’s how much I trust the man. I would do anything that he asked me to.”

The actor said getting back into character as crystal meth cook Jesse was very straightforward.

“It was so easy for me to just jump into where Jesse’s at mentally, emotionally, because I lived and breathed everything he went through and then some, and so, honestly, it felt like a part of me had gone through that as well,” he said.

“All I had to do was just memorise these words and then play them out when they yelled ‘action’.”

Breaking Bad followed Bryan Cranston’s mild-mannered chemistry teacher, who turns to drug dealing after being diagnosed with cancer. He enlists the help of his former student Jesse and the pair become major players in the criminal underworld.

El Camino will arrive on Netflix on October 11.

It will see Jesse escape from captivity and “come to terms with his past in order to forge some kind of future”, the streaming service said.