Without comic book movies in theaters right now, conspiracy-theory fuel is running low in the entertainment realm, but luckily, there’s still some leftover pop-culture craziness to soak up on occasion. Bryan Cranston loves to tease, too, like when addressing whether Walter White could pop up on Better Call Saul, but there’s one inevitability that he cannot avoid: that Heisenberg is dead, man. Totally dead.
The subject (inevitably) arose when Cranston paid a Zoom visit to Jimmy Fallon on Monday night to discuss his Covid-19 diagnosis, which he said went down in early March, close to the time when Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced their positive statuses. Cranston said he didn’t go public because Hanks had already done so (“There’s no need for another celebrity to say, ‘Hey, I got it too.’ So I just kept it quiet”), but he did give Hanx a call. Cranston encouraged viewers who had recovered from the virus to donate plasma, and then Fallon switched to fan-theory territory. Specifically, he asked about the conspiracy that Walter White never died.
The theory holds that White somehow snuck away and forged a new identity, Hal Wilkerson from Malcolm In The Middle, which would in turn be an unofficial Breaking Bad sequel. Well, Cranston is “not at liberty” to confirm or deny this speculation, but he can say this: “Walter White is definitely dead. He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead. He’s dead.” As Jesse Pinkman would probably say, case closed, “b*tches.”
Watch the relevant Cranston-Fallon chat moment after the 5:00 minute mark below.