One Of Breaking Bad's Most Heart-Wrenching Scenes Was Improvised By A Baby
"Breaking Bad" is one of the great television tragedies of all time, following high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) on an incredible downward spiral after he decides to start dealing meth in the wake of a devastating health diagnosis. There are quite a few truly soul-crushing moments throughout the show's five-season run because no one was really safe and major characters could get taken out in an instant — heck, even the show's beating heart, Jesse (Aaron Paul), almost bought the farm (sorry, cow house) back in season 1! But one of the most heart-wrenching scenes of all has nothing to do with death, instead happening when Walt abducts his infant daughter, Holly, in the season 5 scorcher "Ozymandias."
In an oral history of the seminal episode for The Ringer, director Rian Johnson, writer and executive producer Moira Walley-Beckett, and Cranston revealed that the most devastating part of that scene was actually improvised by the child actor playing Holly, Moira Bryg MacDonald. The baby's real reaction to something off-camera caused a pretty genuine reaction out of Cranston, leading to one of Walt's last truly humanizing moments before his eventual destruction.
She said 'Mama' and brought him to tears
In "Ozymandias," Walt's meth empire has come crashing down around him and he wants to go on the run, desperate for his family to join him. When they won't, he grabs baby Holly and bails, having a moment later to try and figure out what to do in a bathroom. As he's looking her over, he realizes that he cannot take her on the run and put her in danger, and as scripted she's supposed to "maybe touch his face." Instead, the child actor said "Mama, Mama," because her mother was just off-camera, and it unlocked something in Cranston's performance, creating what Johnson called "one of those pure lightning strikes of luck that you probably don't get twice in a lifetime."
The moment happened on the very first take, which is probably why the baby was so freshly interested in getting back to Mama. Instead of breaking character, Cranston reacted as if it were Holly herself actually crying for her mother, Walt's estranged wife Skylar (Anna Gunn). It's then that he realizes that he can't take Holly away from her mother and separate his family, and it leads to him completely breaking down. He may have already become irredeemable at that point to many (including Cranston), but at least Walt still loved his daughter enough to return her to Skylar.
The final days of Walter White
"Ozymandias" is a brutal episode that separates Walt from his family, kills his brother-in-law Hank, and even imprisons poor Jesse, but somehow little Holly's tears and cries for her mother are still among the most painful. While the credit really goes to Cranston, who went with the improvisation in the moment instead of reacting as himself, series showrunner Vince Gilligan was even more impressed with Bryg MacDonald:
"That was one of the best performances in the whole series. That baby looked so sad. I promise you, no babies were harmed in the episode."
While the moment wasn't enough to move Gilligan to tears, he would end up crying while working on a scene from two episodes later in the series finale, finding himself shaken when Walt finally dies in a hail of gunfire. While that had as much to do with saying goodbye to the series as it did the scene itself, it's still a testament to the emotional power of "Breaking Bad" and the characters it introduced to the world.