Anna Gunn famously played Skyler White on Breaking Bad, and when the show aired, many people criticized her character, and Gunn felt that blowback and found it upsetting. But now, Gunn says attitudes have changed, and people better understand the position Skyler was in and how she was trying to get Walt (Bryan Cranston) to do the right thing on the show.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Gunn said she wasn’t tuned into the controversy at the time over her character because she wasn’t plugged into social media. People told her what others were saying, and she decided to read the comments–this was “probably a mistake,” she said.
“But it’s a mistake that led to a great deal of soul searching and me thinking, ‘Well, is it me?’ And I think the writers went through the same thing: ‘Is it the way we’ve written her?’ [Series creator Vince Gilligant] would sometimes say, ‘My gosh, no matter what we do with Walt, no matter how bad he breaks, people are still going, ‘Yay!’ They’re still in his corner and they’re still behind him,” she said.
Gunn said it was her lot to “go through that ring of fire” and deal with the abuse. A lot of it, she said, was misogynistic. “A lot of it was the way that female characters were treated, and I think we’ve come a long way since then,” she said.
Gunn said she’s proud of the many actresses who have spoken up over the years and “continued to pave the way and created their own antihero characters for themselves.”
Gunn said she wrote her 2013 op-ed for the New York Times about the response to Skyler because she has two daughters and she wanted them to understand what was going on.
Part of the reason people were so mean to Gunn was due to the anonymity of the internet, she said. “Nobody ever came up to me in person and said, ‘Oh my God, I hate you!’ People don’t do that. They save that stuff for the internet because, for the reasons that we all know, it’s anonymous and it’s hidden and people can let it fly,” she said.
But anonymous comments online can still be alarming and upsetting, Gunn said, because they can become violent. “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,” she said.
These days, when people approach Gunn and talk to her about her Breaking Bad character, Gunn says she’s observed a shift in what people say. “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,'” she said. “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.'”
Gunn currently stars on the AppleTV+ series Sugar with Colin Farrell.
