HitFix: If that was The Impotent Mustache, what was this season’s goatee?
Bryan Cranston: Badass. Truly. Here’s the interesting thing, it’s a generalization, but the generalization is true, hair can either be intimidating or not. And here’s the interesting distinction: No hair on the head, a man is more intimidating. A bald head is more intimidating. But no hair on the face, is less intimidating. So if you have hair on your face and not on your head, then you have the combination that’s most intimidating. It’s just an observation that I came up with. I looked around and I started looking at different photos and at different people around town and I’m absolutely convinced of this. No matter what race and no matter what age, hair on the face and no hair on the head is the most intimidating look there can be. That’s what I wanted and that’s what we talked about. I said, “When the chemo comes, we’ve gotta shave the head” and I lost all of that weight because of the chemo and then I said, “We should keep this.” It was right for the character and, at the time, I said “I think that if Walt doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror, I think he can convince himself to continue what he’s doing, but if he sees the old Walt, with the hair and the little mustache, he may start going, ‘Oh, what am I doing?’”
So that was my argument for keeping the bald head. Then I started making that other observation and I thought that Walt’s paying attention and he’s looking around. He’s intimidating people for the first time in his life. The first time it worked was when he had to lose his hair and went to Tuco’s lair and he threw down that fulminated mercury and that was badass. And he went, “There’s something here. There’s something to this.” There was a look, a feeling, a presentation. That can all be very intimidating, so that’s what we stayed with, the facial hair and the bald head. And unless I hear a better argument, that’s where I’ll stay.
