For the past five seasons, Anna Gunn has played the character of Skyler White on AMC’s Breaking Bad. She has gone from completely ignorant of her husband’s, Walter, meth business to becoming a money laundering accomplice. However, despite Skyler wanting to save her kids from this dangerous business, she is still seemed as the antagonist to viewers of the show.
In an interview with the New York Times, she says, “the way the show was set up, Walt’s the protagonist, and you know the reasons he’s doing what he’s doing. You continue to root for him. And she is the most consistent block to him. She became, in a way, the show’s antagonist through that.”
However, Gunn wonders why viewers didn’t take more of a closer look at Skyler and the emotions that she’s trying to convey. In season five, there is a famous scene where she pretends to drown herself so she can get her kids far from her husband. In an interview with The Los Angeles Time, she talks about this board range of emotions that Skyler really hasn’t shown before. She says, “She started out in kind of a state of paralysis that we hadn't really seen her in before because it was really important to Vince [Gilligan] that Skyler be a character of tremendous strength and steely backbone. So she had been trying so hard to be a person of action. And then she finally found herself in a place where she was stuck, really, really stuck for the first time[…]”
Viewers will finally find out the fate of Skyler and her family in the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad starting August 11.
Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons