Vince Gilligan served up a big slice of “Breaking Bad” insider information on Thursday, revealing the answer to a years-old mystery: How did the pizza that Walter White threw onto the roof of his house in a fit of anger manage to remain intact?
During a Reddit AMA session on Thursday, “Breaking Bad” creator Gilligan explained the decision to leave the pizza unsliced so that it wouldn’t fall to pieces on its flight to the roof.
He also explained that the decision required some after-the-fact writing to keep the logic as intact as the pie.
As Gilligan recalled, after deciding to keep the pie whole, the “Breaking Bad” writing crew came up with a scene in which Jesse Pinkman’s pals, Skinny Pete and Badger, show up at Pinkman’s party with a stack of unsliced pizzas.
“That’s the gimmick,” Badger explains to a confused Pinkman in the scene. “This place, they don’t cut the pizza, and they pass the savings on to you.”
“We had a long discussion before we shot the pizza on the roof scene about whether or not the pizza should be sliced — because, as all you physicists know, a thrown, sliced pizza would come apart due to centrifugal force or angular momentum (or something like that),” Gilligan recalled during the Reddit session.
“And yet, you’re right: no self-respecting pizza parlor sells an unsliced pizza. So we figured we needed to explain it (in the ‘They pass the savings on to you’ scene), or else face our audience’s righteous wrath!”
Logical or not, the pizza-throwing scene remains one of the most memorable moments of “Breaking Bad” — so much so that the house where the scene was filmed has subsequently been bombarded with pizzas by fans of the series, much to Gilligan’s disappointment.
On a 2015 podcast for the “Breaking Bad” prequel “Better Call Saul,” Gilligan addressed the issue, saying that the couple that lives in the house are “two nicest people in the world, and they deserve to be treated well.”
“Let me tell ya, there is nothing original or funny or cool about throwing a pizza on this lady’s roof,” Gilligan said, his anger rising like a pizza crust in the oven. “It’s just not funny. It’s been done before. You are not the first.”
“So uncool,” Gilligan added. “Please stop.”
Watch the party scene and behind-the-scenes video of the pizza-throwing scene below.