The fourth season premiere of Breaking Bad "Box Cutter" is nearly upon us and it already has our compound boiling, vision filled with steam and internal chemistry ready to explode with anticipation as we wait for the continued story of Walter White, and the cliffhanger of his fate.
As we remember the three seasons that led up to the volatile premiere, we come across one standout element that acts as something of a mascot for the series at large. Even if it has since been crushed and abandoned, that wonderful rolling meth lab RV always comes to mind. The RV seems to be something of a recurring motif for actor Bryan Cranston, who also spent an episode of Malcolm in the Middle setting up shop outside an RV at Burning Man, only for stoned participants to mistake his domestic behavior for performance art.
But what of Cranston himself in real life? We recently had a chance to speak with the Breaking Bad star, where he relayed his own experiences traveling in an RV:
Bryan Cranston: I took my family, several years ago now, maybe eight or nine years ago,
on a Winnebago trip from LA to where we lived in Arizona. Then, up from
Arizona into Utah. So we went to the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Arches
national park, and all the national parks, in Utah mostly, Canyonlands and Zion,
and all through there, ended up in Las Vegas. It’s funny because what you
realize when you’re a kid is how great those trips are. “Oh it’s
fantastic and it’s so much fun.” Well yeah it’s fun for the kids. The
parents park the car, the kids jump out and they go run around. The parents
then have to level the thing and back it up and let’s get the beds ready
because it’s going to get late, and you’re making beds and let’s get
the dinner together and turn the hot water on, get the generator and "oh
it’s not quite working so let’s troubleshoot that and it’s like all
this work! Hey let’s have a cookout, let’s have a barbeque! Ok that’s
more work, let’s go gather some wood." It’s a lot more work than you
ever realize. The kids want to ride bikes: ok I’ll go to the roof and
unstrap the bikes and try to hand them down. It’s like all that stuff!
So
we’re going through and it’s bizarre because sometimes you catch
yourself and realize you're off schedule. When all of a sudden it's "uh-oh we got there a little
late, and the stores are closed, and it’s getting dark. We better just
camp." So we park it here, and all of a sudden it's "what do we have to
eat?" I remember one time my wife put together a casserole of tuna, and some
kind of almond slivers, green beans, and those mandarin oranges. It was a
casserole like that of something bizarre. I think we also had some kind of
bread crumbs that we crumbled on type like it was some kind of expensive
cheese or something. My wife by the way said "never again are we going on a
trip like this." And she’s having fun but she said "it’s a rolling outhouse, it’s not like a hotel." It’s a rolling outhouse, because they
still haven’t perfected that end of it.
Outhouse, and meth lab.
Bryan Cranston: We ended the trip in Las Vegas at the Circus Circus RV park. I didn’t think that far ahead and think of exactly where we’re going to end up, and we’re in Las Vegas. You can’t just park, you gotta find an RV park, and we’re like "here’s one we’ll just go here." It was a Saturday night I think, and we were tired, and it was maybe midnight, and these people next to us were having this party. And of course the walls on these things are like paper mache. And so I go out and say "hey guys it’s been a long day, and it’s midnight, and we’re trying to sleep, can you just keep the noise down?" And they all just looked at me and said "Dude! It’s midnight, in Vegas, on Saturday...this is what we came here for!" And my wife is laughing and she says to me “You don’t have to do this anymore, you don’t have to travel this way.” Because I was lower middle income status when I was a kid, so RV and camping was the way to go because it was so much cheaper. The idea of staying in hotels, that was just nearly impossible. It’s public pools, and RVing, and all those kind of blue collar-y kind of life and she said, “We don’t need to do this anymore.” "Yeah maybe not, you’re right, ok."
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No DEA agents blowing holes in the door, or supercharging the batery with zinc oxide to escape certain death? Guess if you want your real fill of Bryan Cranston in action, you'll have to check out the season premiere of Breaking Bad this sunday at 10pm on AMC!
