Could all of Walter White’s problems have been solved with a good hug and Prozac?
Bryan Cranston, who played the mild mannered teacher-turned-ruthless meth kingpin on the AMC series “Breaking Bad,” weighed in on his character’s emotional state on “CBS This Morning,” saying that White suffered from a “deep depression.”
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“I related to this man — I knew men like him who missed opportunities in their lives, but still became functioning, still loving to their family, still paying their bills, but there’s something that died in [their] interior. They’re putting one step in front of the other, they’re in deep depression,” Cranston — who”s currently playing President Lyndon B. Johnson on Broadway — offered.
“In doing some of the research, I found that — in broad strokes — when people are in deep depression, there are two basic ways it manifests: Either externally or internally,” Cranston continued.
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White, Cranston offered, took the internal route.
“That was Walter White — he went into a shell. He didn’t care about his looks, he didn’t care about his weight, he didn’t care about his clothes. Nothing mattered to him. He was invisible to himself and the world. This ironic diagnosis of terminal cancer was his get-out-of-jail-free card. It exploded his emotions … Even if it’s just for a short period of time, those last two years of his life were full and exciting, and I don’t think he would have traded it.”
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Watch Cranston diagnose Walter White below.