While nobody has yet gone ‘full Heisenberg’, Vince Gilligan’s message about the perils of meth production and distribution apparently failed to reach a handful of hard-up educators. William Duncan, a chemistry teacher from Texas, was arrested for selling home-cooked meth within school grounds; in 2011, 74-year-old mathematics professor Irina Kristy was caught running a meth lab from her Boston home; North Carolina teacher’s assistant and meth chef Marc Hodges was arrested earlier this year after suspiciously purchasing 1,000 cases of matches; and Stephen Doran, a Boston teacher with stage 3 cancer, was found dealing meth and arrested in May. But perhaps the most striking case of life imitating art occurred before Breaking Bad was even on television.
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"If you can do comedy you can do drama," Vince Gilligan said recently of his approach to casting. "It doesn’t necessarily flow the other way." Consequently, Breaking Bad is packed with funny men – even if they’re not always given the chance to show it. Bob Odenkirk (Saul) is well known as the co-creator of US TV’s last great sketch series, Mr Show; Bill Burr (Kuby) is a stand-up comic, as are Lavell Crawford (Huell), Steven Michael Quezada (poor Gomie), and Javier Grajeda (Gus Fring’s boss at the cartel, and the man who put a severed head on a tortoise). And before he was a struggling actor, Bryan Cranston spent several months as a floundering comedian.
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For the aptly titled season 4 finale, Face Off, Vince Gilligan sought help from the prosthetic-effects team behind AMC’s zombie series The Walking Dead. Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger made a model of Gustavo Fring’s exploded Evil-Dead-meets-Two-Face head, which was then digitally blended with actor Giancarlo Esposito’s real noggin. According to Gilligan, “it took months”.
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Far from being a drug baron’s digs or even a building dreamt up by Vince Gilligan, Walter White’s house in Breaking Bad has been the real-life home of a woman called Fran since 1973. She admits that “a lot of artistic licence” was taken with the property’s interior by the production designer and that Gilligan originally wanted to cover the pool up. And she doesn’t mind the hundreds of cars that slow down in front of her house every month.
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