John Cusack has revisited one of Hollywood’s most persistent ‘what if?’ casting stories, going directly to Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan to confirm if he had ever been offered Walter White.
Cusack brought up the long-running claim that he had rejected the lead role in the AMC drama, which ultimately went to Bryan Cranston, when asked if he turned down Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.
“Some of those things are so weird, because there was this whole riff that I had turned down Walter White,” the High Fidelity star told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And I never ever remembered that, and I was like, ‘Did that happen and I blacked it out? Did I lose time?’”
Rather than leaving the question to Hollywood lore, Cusack asked Gilligan himself. “I met Vince Gilligan in New York, and I was like, ‘Hey, man, I love your show, it’s awesome. I gotta know, everyone is saying you offered me that – did you offer me that?’” Cusack said.
“He was like, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Thank you, Vince!’” he said.
Breaking Bad premiered in January 2008 and ran till 2013, and followed Walter White (Cranston), a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who turns to making and selling methamphetamine with his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) after being diagnosed with cancer.
The cast also included Anna Gunn as Walter’s wife Skyler, Dean Norris as his DEA-agent brother-in-law Hank Schrader, RJ Mitte as his son Walter Jr, and later Bob Odenkirk as lawyer Saul Goodman, Giancarlo Esposito as drug kingpin Gustavo Fring, and Jonathan Banks as fixer Mike Ehrmantraut.
Over its five-season run, Breaking Bad went from a relatively modest AMC drama to one of the most acclaimed and decorated television series of its era. It received 58 Emmy nominations and won 16 Emmys, including four Outstanding Lead Actor awards for Cranston, three Supporting Actor awards for Aaron Paul, and two Supporting Actress awards for Gunn. Breaking Bad also won Outstanding Drama Series in 2013 and 2014, with Gilligan receiving the directing Emmy for the finale, Felina, in 2014.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the series currently has a 96 per cent critics’ score and a 97 per cent audience score, with its third and fourth seasons seeing perfect 100 per cent season scores.
This is not the first time Cusack has disputed the story. In 2013, after a fan told him on X, formerly Twitter, that he “made a mistake turning down the role of Walter White”, Cusack replied: “Didn’t turn it down. U crazy.”
Didn’t turn it down u crazy “@DJKnoxs: You made a mistake turning down the role of Walter White,Breaking Bad is the best T.V show ever”
— John Cusack (@johncusack) September 29, 2013
The same year, an E! News report said that Cusack and Ferris Bueller's Day Off star Matthew Broderick had been on early casting lists, and while the former was never offered the role, both actors were “given the script”.
Media reports at the time also carried the story forward, that producers had initially wanted either Cusack or Broderick for Walter White and that both had “passed”.
Cranston, who at the time was still known for Hal, the well-meaning but chaotic father he played on Malcolm in the Middle, which reportedly made it hard for executives to see him in the role as a morally compromised chemistry teacher.
Cranston too has addressed the rumour and told Route magazine in 2017 that it wasn’t true and their “names were on a casting list”.
He explained that he had worked with Gilligan earlier in 1998 on an episode of The X-Files that had been written by Gilligan. “So I went in to meet him on this thing called Breaking Bad and he was my champion to get the role, just like Linwood Boomer who created Malcolm in the Middle was my champion to get that role,” he said.
