The Breaking Bad Scene That Made Bryan Cranston Break Down In Tears

What's the saddest moment in all of "Breaking Bad"? Some would say it's when Walt (Bryan Cranston) steals his infant daughter Holly away from his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) in their big fight in "Ozymandias." Or maybe it's the follow-up episode where Walt wastes away alone in rural New Hampshire, dying from his returned cancer and struggling with all the damage he's caused to his family. (You can read our detailed interview with the showrunners and writers about how they cooked up the final season of "Breaking Bad" right here.)

But I'd argue that the show's saddest moment was the intense death of poor Jane (Krysten Ritter), a woman who seemed really cool before she relapsed, but then started spiraling hard along with Jesse (Aaron Paul). Jane often gets a lot of flak from fans for introducing Jesse to heroin or for blackmailing Walt, but she never would've done those things if Jesse hadn't knocked her off the wagon in the first place. Some viewers may not appreciate this, but Jesse sure does: His guilt and grief over Jane follows him throughout the rest of the show. It even haunts Walt too, despite his growing descent into evil. 

Betsy Brandt, who played Marie Schrader in the series, revealed in a 2023 interview that Jane's death, when she overdoses from heroin while Walt stands beside her, refusing to help because he knows it'll be better for business if Jane is out of the picture and no longer the focus of Jesse's attention, was one of the hardest sequences for Bryan Cranston to film: 

"I saw him right after that. That was a tough scene. I mean, it's funny, we would do a class picture every year. Okay, everybody would come and do a class picture and he was crying, like ... Someone was hugging him. It was like — it was tough."

Cranston himself talked about this moment in a 2016 interview:

"We're shooting the scene ... Planted in there somewhere as I see her choking on the vomit, you know, and wondering 'what should I do?', all of a sudden, her facial features disappeared and it was replaced with the features of my real daughter. I saw my real child choking to death, and it scared me ... And then maybe a few seconds later that disappeared and her Kristen's face came back, but there was a moment where it was very clear it was my own daughter."

Cranston also spoke about how he'd created a list of pros and cons for his character before the scene, trying to dive into Walt's thought process. The cons of saving Jane were clear: She was getting in the way of Walt and Jesse's meth business. But the pros of saving Jane were also obvious: As Cranston put it, "She's just a kid. She could be my daughter, she's that young."

The notes he wrote down before the scene sure seemed to bleed into his performance, and the result is one of the most haunting sequences in the entire show. Jane's death is often considered Walt's moral point of no return, and it clearly sticks to Walt for the rest of the series. In one of season 3's best (if admittedly controversial) episodes, "Fly," Walt talks about what he thought would've been the best time for him to die, and he picks a moment shortly before this episode. If he died from cancer there, he would've been remembered as a good father and an upstanding member of his community. Instead, he lived to let Jane choke to death on her own vomit, and it was all downhill from there.