In the end, Gunn remains positive about the Breaking Bad backlash, telling EW, "It was extremely important for me to go through, and very powerful for me to learn that people will always have their opinions — and it can be for varied reasons, and that's fine."
Even as Gunn clearly struggled with reconciling the toxic side of Breaking Bad's fandom, it's become just as clear that her co-stars were always in her corner. Gunn's character shared little screen time with Walt's Breaking Bad co-cook Jesse Pinkman, who was supposed to die during the first season of the show, but actor Aaron Paul remains one of the biggest supporters of Gunn's work on the series. Paul shared to EW his own assessment of the Skyler hate: "Why did our audience not sympathize with this poor woman? Granted, she is the thorn in Walter White's side, and everyone's rooting for Walter to succeed, but my God. You wake up one day you find out your husband is a meth kingpin, you know, you're going to have something to say about that. I really felt for Anna, because she's just such a beautiful human inside and out, and she played Skyler in such a fierce way, and people just dragged her character the most."
Cranston later chimed in with his own take on the issue, saying, "We didn't see this happening. As Aaron said, if you look at the elements that were involved in this — husband she finds out is lying, husband she finds out is doing something illegal, is doing something that puts her family in lethal danger, and she's being chastised — it's like, 'Wait a minute.' It baffled me from an objective standpoint."
Not for nothing, Mr. Cranston, but the misguided Skyler White hate continues to baffle us as well.
