Throughout Breaking Bad's run, the beloved AMC series introduced all manner of drug dealers, murderers, and generally Bad Dudes while sending its protagonist, Walter White (Bryan Cranston), down a darker and darker path himself. But, at the time, few characters got more hate than Walter's own wife, Skyler.
History, however, is proving to be a little kinder to Skyler. Anna Gunn, the actress who played Skyler White from 2008 through 2013, says as much in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote her new Apple TV+ series Sugar. In it, she looks back at the hate she received at the time - which, she notes, was mostly confined to the internet - as well as how attitudes have changed over the past decade.
"It did become alarming when it turned violent," she remembers. "Sometimes, the comments could turn threatening or violent, and that concerned me. So I just didn’t want to feel bullied by all that, and I felt that it was my responsibility to stand up and answer to it, which is what I did."
Gunn's referring to an op-ed she wrote for The New York Times as Breaking Bad was finishing its run titled "I Have a Character Issue." In the op-ed, she wrote about the fan forums and Facebook pages dedicated to hating her character, writing that she "was unprepared for the vitriolic response (Skyler) inspired."
"So I really just had to go through that ring of fire, for lack of a better phrase, to understand that a lot of it was, frankly, misogynistic," she says in the THR interview.
"And now, when people come up to me, it’s incredibly different because of all the seismic changes that have happened," she continues. "There’s still a long way to go, but we really have made seismic changes since then. So people come up to me now and say, 'You were the linchpin for me. You were the conscience of the show. You were what pulled me into the show.' Or they say, 'The first time I watched it, I hated that character. But the second time I watched it, I realized, ‘Oh my God, that poor woman.’ "
The hate toward both Skyler and Gunn is something even Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has slammed in retrospect, telling the New Yorker in a 2022 interview: "I can tell you it always troubled me, because Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve that. And Anna certainly did nothing to deserve that. She played the part beautifully.”
"People come up to me now and say, 'You were the linchpin for me. You were the conscience of the show.'
“
Gunn, however, says that in writing the op-ed at the time, "I felt like I had done what I needed to do and said what I needed to say and made peace with it in that way." When asked if the hate kept her from ever appearing in spinoff Better Call Saul, Gunn says she wasn't "particularly afraid" of it and adds, "I don’t know that the writers could ever quite figure out a way to make that happen."
"The writers also felt so badly," she says. "Sometimes, they’d come to me and say, 'We’re sorry!' So it’s a weird phenomenon. People love the antihero. They want to be the one saying, 'Screw you,' to their boss, and, 'I’m going to do what I want.' But Skyler was the only one calling out the lie."
For more on Breaking Bad, check out where it landed on IGN readers' list of the top TV shows of all time.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
