Aaron Paul improvised El Camino’s best line
By Matt Moore
Aaron Paul admitted that a famous line in the Breaking Bad movie El Camino wasn’t in the script.
Breaking Bad assembled one of the most talented casts and crews in television history. Stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul delivered lines written by creator Vince Gilligan and an all-star team of writers. That didn’t leave much room for improvising or adding lines to the show. But El Camino was a little different.
Breaking Bad earned countless Emmy and Golden Globe award nominations for the series, its acting, its directing, and its writing. Quotes from Bryan Cranston’s Walter White character are still referenced years after the show ended its run on AMC.
It’s not that common for a character on such an intense drama to have a catchphrase. Catchphrases are usually reserved for sitcoms or animated series. But then again, television audiences had never really seen a character like Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman before.
Naturally, fans were excited to hear that Jesse’s story from Breaking Bad would be concluded in the Netflix movie El Camino. It also meant that fans would hear Jesse’s catchphrase again. But as Aaron Paul told Conan O’Brien, his famous line wasn’t originally in El Camino.
It’s hard to imagine a movie about Jesse Pinkman that didn’t include the line “yeah bitch.” Somehow it slipped Vince GIlligan’s mind when he wrote the script for El Camino. And it even took Aaron Paul a few read throughs of the story to realize no “yeah bitch” was present.
Thankfully fans were not disappointed. Like Paul and O’Brien, we’ll avoid spoilers in case you haven’t watched the movie. But the line is added at a perfect time in the movie, even if it does come during a not-so-badass scene involving a salad.
Paul improvising the line is proof of just how much he inhabited the character of Jesse Pinkman. As he told O’Brien, he knew the character so well that it wasn’t hard to return to the intensity of his final Breaking Bad scene to continue El Camino.
It also sounds like Paul has come to realization there is no escaping the catchphrase. In the past, he has admitted that he’s over fans calling him the term he helped make famous.
El Camino and Breaking Bad are both streaming on Netflix. You can watch both over and over to get your fill of Aaron Paul delivering his famous line over and over. Now you can do it knowing that all but one was expertly crafted and placed by Vice Gilligan and the writers.