One of the worst byproducts of the prestige TV era (next to having 27 American Horror Stories), is how producers and actors—even long after the series has wrapped—have to deals with reporters probing about unanswered questions from their shows. Showrunners: You’re not Kevin Durant. It’s OK to give a straight answer. We’re going to watch anyway.
At last, we can put one of the big ones to rest. On Monday, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan stopped by The Rich Eisen Show to promote El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, a Netflix film that will continue Jesse Pinkman’s story. During the interview, Eisen asked Gilligan outright about the fate of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White—whom we last saw going Rambo in the series finale’s last-act shootout, eventually getting wounded and appearing to die.
Gillian answered, "Yeah, I'm gonna give you that one, Rich, because I love you so much. Yes, Walter White is dead. Yes.”
There we go—that wasn’t so hard. It's the clearest answer we've had from Gilligan, who has only either debunked theories about the show, or joked about Walter's fate in the past. In a 2017 Reddit AMA, a user asked if Heinsenberg was dead, and Gilligan replied, "Sure looked that way to me!" And in 2013, he shot down speculation that the series finale all happened in Walter's head.
But still, Gilligan LeBroned the question of whether or not we’ll see Walter White in El Camino at all, whether that’s via Jesse-nightmare-dream-sequence, or a flashback. The voice at the end of El Camino’s first full trailer certainly sounded like Heisenberg’s low-register growl. And we already know that El Camino will see the return of a ton of Breaking Bad characters, even ones that are already dead—including Jonathan Banks’s Mike Ehrmantraut, who confirmed to ET Canada that he’ll show up in the movie.
Until then, we’ll have to make due with all the Cranston-Plemons bro-hugs from the El Camino premiere, which is OK with us.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie will release on Netflix 11 October.
