Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are coming back to the Breaking Bad universe in Better Call Saul this season, reprising their roles as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. This was confirmed all the way back in April, but according to Paul, their involvement in the show was supposed to be a surprise.
Speaking to the Albuquerque Journal, Paul and Cranston spoke about the extreme lengths that AMC went to in an effort to keep their involvement in the show a secret.
“We were asked to keep it a secret forever,” Cranston said. “We were flown in under the darkness of night. We took this plane and they went to a certain private section of the airport there. And then we took like two steps out of the tarmac and into an SUV. They move us to an Airbnb–a duplex. He had the top floor. I had the bottom floor and we were told you can’t leave.”
They're coming back. #BetterCallSaul pic.twitter.com/IXDq6KarcN
— Better Call Saul (@BetterCallSaul) April 10, 2022
Cranston and Paul stayed in their apartments for the four days they were in Albuquerque filming their Better Call Saul scenes, only leaving to shoot. According to the report, Cranston and Paul walked laps around their apartments for exercise instead of going outside where they might be spotted.
AMC went to these drastic lengths to keep things a secret and then openly talked about in April at Paleyfest, and AMC just tweeted it out.
“It’s so funny that because this was supposed to be a big surprise, a big secret,” Paul said. “Then all of a sudden they announced that we were doing it, so why did they keep us in a prison? Seriously, they were just messing with us.”
This probably felt familiar to Cranston in particular, as he flew on a private jet in secret to avoid people finding out he would appear in the Breaking Bad movie El Camino.
Walter died at the end of Breaking Bad, but Better Call Saul is a prequel so he’s probably living somewhere in Albuquerque at the time. As for Jesse, he would have also presumably been living in Albuquerque during the events of Better Call Saul.
Showrunner Peter Gould previously teased Entertainment Weekly, “I think the way you see them and when you see them won’t necessarily be what you’d expect.”
Better Call Saul returned for the second half of its sixth and final season on July 11. New episodes air each Monday night until the show wraps up on August 15. As of yet, there is no word on when Walter and Jesse will appear in Better Call Saul, but the IMDB pages for Cranston and Paul suggest they will appear in the July 25 episode, “Nippy.”
