Anna Gunn

0:00So how were things? How was the weekend? Weekend was good. I'm still sort of waking up. My daughter had a sleepover last night and there was a great deal of madness. But it was fun. How old are the kids? How old are you daughter? They are 11 and 5. Oh wow, nice. It's a nice mixture. It is a good mixture. So I guess the crux of this article, we're going to be talking about a bunch of things. I want to obviously talk about the Emmy. Congratulations. Thank you. The character, you as an actress and how you approach the role of Skylar. A little bit of a preview for next week because this will go up this week and maybe a little bit of a recap from last night's episode too if that works for you. Sure. Okay. So how much time do you have? For about 20, 25 minutes.

0:46Yeah, cool. I just don't want to take up too much of your time. Okay. So let's start with the Emmy nomination. Where were you when you got the call? What did you do? How did that happen? I was actually in bed and I was trying to sleep because I figured, you know, if it's good news, the phone will ring. But my eyes did pop open at probably 5, 28 or 5, 29 or something. I was at the clock and then I just lay there and I was trying. My five year old climbed into bed with me. So I was just trying to snuggle up and I thought, well, phone ring's great. I was like, no, go back to sleep. And that's all right. And then it started ringing. My cell started buzzing at about five, I don't know, five, 50, 5, 48 or something.

1:32And I didn't want to wake my little one up. So I went over and got myself. And then closed the door and then went up to the living room to try and jubulate in a fashion that would not wake up my girls. But of course I woke them up immediately and they came running out and saying, well, what's wrong? I said, no, no, everything's great. And then they were up and we all did a lot of happy dancing around the living room. Do they know what you do? They obviously must know what you do. I doubt they watch the show, given the content. People have asked me that and they say no, they do not watch the show. But they do know what I do. And they come visit, you know, they come back and forth to New Mexico when I'm out there all the time. And on appropriate days, they can come out and watch them filming.

2:18Right. Well, most of your scenes are fairly... Most of my scenes are yeah, or not. You wouldn't know what was going on. So yeah. Speaking of your scenes last night, the standing up for yourself speech, if that does not secure the... I mean, I don't know if that counts, but it definitely should. Because that was like the point for Skylar. Yeah, it sure was. It sure was. And that scene I thought was kind of her penultimate scene of the entire series thus far. So that with the shut up, shut up, shut up with Marie that they're the week before. And then on to this, those two episodes are just so extraordinary. And what they felt like were talking actually to Vince about it, we were doing a podcast the other day for the episode that just aired last night.

3:08And so we were talking all about the evolution of Skylar's character. And I said I found it interesting and sometimes confusing as to why Skylar just wasn't more of an emotional person. Because I am such an emotional person and I'm pretty easy to tears and I'm kind of sentimental and stuff like that. And Vince just was very clear on who Skylar was. And she was just not one of those people. She was not going to be that person ringing her hands in the corner going, oh my, oh my, what shall I do? She was not ever going to be that. She really, really had this vision of her being very, very strong and having a very strong backbone and able to stand up to anything thrown her way anything.

3:54And so she's been sort of trying to take action. That's in Skylar's way of coping. It was not like for her it was never that she was going to sit down and just have some big emotional breakdown. And I think that this emotional stuff that's happening now has really been just what she's kept inside and really tightly clung to and kept her lid on. And she's been very like so close tight over it that it's almost been painful sometimes when I go home from the set at the end of the day. In previous seasons I think, gosh my muscles are really tight. Why is that? It was simply because that kind of thing to play her that I sort of subconsciously was doing that.

4:39So I think that this is just her time when she can't keep this inside of her any longer. And there's also no more action for her to take. And because of that I think that's why their stuff starts just spoiling out, you're bubbling out. I said a lot and then I don't want to pick up on. But one thing that intrigues me of where you are as a person, you, Anna, do you watch Watch the episodes? Because you can't say certain things that obviously are going to be plot points coming up in future weeks. But you need to kind of know for this press stuff where your character is so you know what you can say. So do you watch the show on a weekly basis? Well you know I do to some degree sometimes with some of those scenes I find them very like the scene last night.

5:25I find it sometimes very difficult to look at because we really just shot that only a couple of months ago. And so the experience of it still is fresh for me and it still is kind of living right inside of me. So it gets activated when I watch it and sometimes I just will have to take a break from a scene. I'll watch the episode, I'll watch everybody else's stuff. But I'll just find it sometimes tough to watch my own stuff. And so I may have to just wait a few days and come back to it and then watch it then because I find myself getting really emotionally you know I don't know drawn into it. And I remember the sort of the pain is playing that scene because it was obviously very very emotionally tough scene.

6:15So yeah sometimes I don't watch it on the Sunday or I don't watch it all on the Sunday but I take a little bit of a break or I take a little longer. And I make sure I'm in the right frame of mind and I also quite frankly make sure it's not too close to bedtime. Because that will interfere with my ability to not have to fall asleep and not have you know bad dreams. So it must be amazing to be a part of a show where those scripts come in every week and it's poetry on paper. Like what Vincent and his team writes is just amazing. So where does a script come to you? When you get it every week do you get the whole thing? Do you just get Skyler's point of view? What do you like to do when the script comes in? We get the whole thing and sometimes towards the end of the season as the storylines get more and more complex and more and more things happen that are real shockers and real twists and turns that are completely unexpected then they will redact the scripts that they hand as I'd say that happens in the latter quarter of the season usually.

7:23And they just want to make sure that those really pivotal moments stay secret for as long as possible. And so all of our scripts are watermarked and there's a lot of everyone's very, very, very careful of their script. Because you know the writers work so hard to you know they leave these complex storylines and they don't want anything getting out and then ruining it for everybody. So that's pretty much how we get them. But we get them in pure full form up until then. And we just, I've said before that the morning you get a new script it's like Christmas morning.

8:08It's like coming you know finding an amazing present under the tree because I myself will either just wherever I am. If it's in the makeup trailer, if I'm at home I just say okay everybody I'm going to be out for you know whatever it is half an hour, 40 minutes. And I just shut myself down and I read the script and I love it. I can never believe what they do from from episode to episode from scene to scene. I'm constantly surprised. I'm constantly surprised at what happens to Skylar even if I think I know maybe where she's heading. You know what she did in last night's episode. I thought she does what? You know she goes into the what? So all this stuff is very much a surprise.

8:58But again because they're so brilliant the writers every single step of the way, every single step these characters take makes sense. It's logical. You know there's nothing where you think oh now come on. Not for me I've never seen anything like that. I think that the characters remain very true. So I think that's your process then. We'll take last night's pivotal scene because for the entire series it's a very pivotal scene. And so you get the script, you read it and then how do you draw that out of yourself as an actress? Do you sit there in a rehearsal with Brian over and over? Do you sit there and contemplate it by yourself? We do a bunch of different things. Yeah. I mean you know the process of I think what we do as actors is or at least this to me it's pretty mysterious.

9:43It's a difficult thing sometimes to describe because it's a process of letting the material sink into you and putting yourself into the material and everybody has different ways of doing that and different methods by which they do that. I am a person who I'm from the theater so I do like to rehearse as much as possible and Brian does as well. And because we work in TV and it's a TV schedule so you're always just really clicking along. You gotta just you know there's not a lot of time and you don't have the benefit or luxury of long rehearsal periods or rather long rehearsal times. You know you go in in the morning getting in here and make up and then they say let's go rehearse the scene. And Brian and I will work in the trailer as much as we can before we're taken in for rehearsal. We'll run minds. We'll go over it.

10:36We'll sometimes if we get to a part that's bumpy for either us meaning bumpy in terms of a logical thing or an emotional jump or something we'll say huh. What do you think of that? And we talk things through. And then we go in and we really we use every second we have of that rehearsal time and sometimes we get lucky and we get a longer. We get a longer period of time because they know for example for that scene. Everybody knew that that was an extremely long and extremely delicate scene and very you know very high charged. So they actually did they factored in much more rehearsal time than they normally would. So we actually had some time to play with it and it was interesting because we first staged it when we went into that bedroom set.

11:27I was just sitting on the bed and Walt was standing over me and essentially we at first first he passed us through the rehearsals. We played it pretty static that way. He was Brian was just sort of hovering over me and I was on the bed and we did it that way. And it was kind of cool because it was very contained and the whole thing was you know then it was just rapid fire back and forth like that. And then everybody kind of thought I wonder if there would be some movement. I wonder if there would be a time when Skyler would maybe get off the bed and what would it be that would make her get off the bed. And we really explored the room and the movement of what might happen if it were if it happened a little bit differently. And so we got to do that and what we discovered was and I thought it worked beautifully was that Walt was sort of pursuing me like I was an animal.

12:16Like I was his prey around that bedroom and he literally he pursued me to every corner of that bedroom. I mean he got me off the bed. I went back into the corner. He pursued me over there. Then I moved to the other side of the room. He pursued me over there. I moved to the other corner of the room. He pursued me over there and then I went back to the bed. And it's rare that also in a scene in a scene for television that you can have the time to shoot like that. You can't generally shoot in every corner of the room because it requires all these different lighting set up, camera set up. But we did it for that scene because everybody when we found that movement everyone went oh that's it. That's it because of the fact that it had like he was the hunter and I was the hunted.

13:01And it had didn't you feel that it had that quality to it to some degree? Absolutely. Yeah of him trying to say what are you going to do? Do you think you're going to get away with this? Do you think and she's about to break? She's breaking down. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But she then stands her ground and then she starts to break and then she has another idea. And I just thought the movement really supported the words beautifully. So that was a case where we have Ryan Johnson, our wonderful director of this episode and Sam Catlin, our wonderful writer. And the four of us really collaborated and really went through it beat for beat. And I felt very, you feel very lucky when you get that because that's more like theater or something.

13:47But this show allows that everybody is allowed to do whatever they need to do to bring their best work and that's what it's about. And sometimes that's what it feels like we're almost shooting, you know, we're shooting sort of short indie movies, you know, every week. That's kind of how we experience that we have. That's amazing. Because as a theater actor and a film or a television actress, it's more of a team atmosphere, right? Because you get to work with the same people over and over. Yeah. Do you prefer that as opposed to doing, let's say, a little red wagon that you just finished shooting, I think? I did. Actually, that was boy a couple years ago. I guess it was coming into. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but it's actually it is a different experience because, you know, when you do just a play that has a three, four month run or a movie,

14:38like where you're shooting for two months. Yeah, it's a much. You're not going to have the same family. You're not going to have the same kind of trust and the same kind of thing necessarily because you don't have the time to build that with people. I find in theater though, especially, you just sort of jump in with each other and you really do become very supportive of each other because of the terror of live theater keeps people, you know, makes people hold on to each other and get close pretty quickly. And you only have three weeks of rehearsal. And so you really, I think a family, actors learn to create family units where they work very quickly. It's part of what we do. And it's part of the thing of you get close to people and you create the family. And then all of a sudden you have to say, well, it was great, you know,

15:28meeting you, working with you. I hope we see each other. And some people you do see again and you remain friends and some people, you know, it's just, you know, their life goes one way and your life goes the other way. And it's that kind of thing. But with this, where we've been together now for five years, this really is a family that's like a true, you know, it's a very, very strong unit. We've seen each other go through divorces and deaths in the family and births and marriages and all sorts of things. And we really, and also because we're shooting out in New Mexico, which, you know, the crew, a lot of the crew live there, but the cast and a lot of the directors are, you know, coming out from, from their way.

16:15And so there's lots of bonding, you know, that goes on there as well because we're, because, because even though I am from New Mexico, I still, you know, I still lived in LA for a long time. So we get a lot of bonding out there as well. And it is. It's very nice. I mean, Brian and I have such shorthand with each other when we work. And that comes from all these years of working together. So, you know, that's part of why we, I think, get to sort of dig into things so deeply now because we really know each other. We trust each other and we know how the other person works. And it's a lucky, it's a lucky thing. Absolutely. We don't have much time. So this is going to be an awful segue, but you're talking about family. And George directed the episode we're going to see next week called Dead Freight George Masters.

17:04And he's been writing with you guys forever. So how do you bring him into the fold and make him feel comfortable? And how did he make you feel comfortable directing an episode for the first time? Well, George is just really, really, he's incredibly smart and incredibly prepared. He came in knowing what he was doing in terms of just having done a lot of homework. And really, you know, you just, you welcome him in by saying, you know, hello, Captain. How can we serve you? You know, it was just about making him comfortable, really listening to him, letting him know that we were right there and we were all ears. And certainly we're going to listen to and take on any and try any idea that he had. And then offer suggestions or offer, you know, ideas, especially Brian who has directed as well and is also one of our producers.

17:56And there's a really collaborative feel on the set. That's really nice. And so he was well supported by Michael Slove as a wonderful cinematographer in terms of, well, maybe it would be in the good if we set the camera here and then you'd have this and that. And so it went very smoothly actually. But I know that this next episode, they went off to, I'm not in it that much. They went off to do a little location shooting up in FANFAA that involved lots of sounds and actions and things like that. And so it was a very big, big, complicated episode for them. And they were three days out in the dust and the elements and they all came back and I was fresh as a daisy.

18:41I came in for work and everybody looked, you know, beaten. And I thought, what happened to you? So you'll see what I mean when you see next episode, which I hear all that stuff. It just looks amazing. So that you can't say much about it. You know, well, you're not really in it. You're really in it. I'm not really in it. I know what it is, but it's such a good surprise. I like to leave it a surprise. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No one likes spoilers. Just, you know, they were on location up in FANFAA for three days and they got wind and dust and sun beat and then, but they, I saw some of the footage and it looked for me. It was really nice to have some of our writers come in and direct this year and then a couple more coming in next season as well to direct. And that's always really fun to have them, you know, direct their own words. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

19:39So I guess you guys go back in production in November. Is that right? We do right after Thanksgiving. Yeah. And then when do you get the scripts in terms of being able to repair? Do you have a lot of prep time? We don't have necessarily a lot of prep time. We'll get the first one. Maybe we can have two weeks in advance. Oh, wow. And that's usually the longest lead time. I mean, maybe we get a little sooner than that. But as the saying rolls along, you know, we might get a script for the next episode. Again, I'd say a week before shooting begins on it. So, you know, I think it's enough time for the actors certainly because we're still really focused on the episode. We're doing it that moment and then you kind of start to look into the next one. I think, okay, where am I going in that? What do I have to do and all that kind of thing? But yeah, we're working quite a quite a clip all the whole time.

20:34So what are you doing until then? What are you going to do for the rest of the summer? Besides, of course, the Emmys in September. Oh, yeah, the Emmy madness. I'm dealing with that. And then, you know, I'm basically, you know, I go back and forth when I'm shooting so much that I'm just having some good time with my kids and just being a mom and taking some time off, which is very, very nice. I'm going to do a little something, a little something in September after they start school, but we'll have to see about the timing of it. And then basically, you know, back November to March and then hopefully on to the next job. We hope that there is another one afterwards, but. Yeah, well, it was going to be put after you win this Emmy. You're going to be the in demand one, don't you worry. Thank you. Okay. Well, before I let you go, we do something called five questions. Okay, five quick questions. One word answers. Okay.

21:30Stager screen. Lennon or McCartney. Lennon. Spielberg or Scorsese. Scorsese. Roll your most proud of and in one word, breaking bad. Awesome. Thank you so much. And that was Vince, not me. Right. I always.