Aaron Paul for Bullett Magazine
Breaking Bad is entering its fifth and final season (the second half of which won’t air until late next year) as one of the most vigorously celebrated shows on television, but it wasn’t an easy sell five years ago. “AMC and Sony got so much shit before this show aired, so much hate mail, saying, ‘Shame on you,’” says Paul, acknowledging the widespread assumptions that the series would somehow glamorize meth use. “But that all stopped the moment the show aired.” Now, quite regularly, “so many recovering addicts come up to me and say, ‘Thank you for being a constant reminder of why I got sober.’ This show is just the raw, honest, brutal truth about what this drug does to people who use it, people who try to sell it, and to everyone around it.”
