Which scenes were the most difficult for the cast of Breaking Bad?

While Cranston notes that he was emotionally tested by the season 2 scene in which Walt stands by while Jane (Krysten Ritter) chokes to death on her own vomit, he picks a more physically arduous moment from that season — the night scene in which Walt and Jesse (Aaron Paul) kidnap Saul (Bob Odenkirk) and force him to dig his own grave by the headlights of the RV. “It was like 9 degrees without the windchill factor, and it was really windy, and sand was kicking up and blowing in our faces,” recallss Cranston. “I’m supposed to hold the gun out and I’m so cold that I’m shaking, and I’m like ‘Oh my god…’ That was probably the toughest scene to do.”

AARON PAUL (Jesse)

Paul indicates that his toughest test came in an episode that hasn’t aired yet. From all of the installments that have aired, though, he points to the scene in which he woke up next to the overdosed and deceased Jane. “Emotionally that was the hardest place to go to,” says Paul. “It was not a fun day. Playing Jesse, I don’t draw upon any of my past experiences, I just try to force myself to believe what’s actually happening. That is why that scene was so rough, because I put myself in Jesse’s position and I forced myself to make myself believe that my girlfriend was there dead in front of me, desperately trying to wake her up, and all of this guilt inside saying, ‘I did this, I did this.’”

ANNA GUNN (Skyler)

Gunn doesn’t reach back far into the show’s history for her choice. It happened in the second half of this season, when Skyler admits the truth to Marie, takes a slap in the face, and gets in a physical struggle with her sister after she tries to take baby Holly. “For Skyler, the worst thing that she could have imagined was for her sister to find out,” says Gunn. “And the worst thing about it was that she could not tell her sister, who is the closest person in the world to her: ‘But listen to the story. Listen to what’s really going on.’ Because to say anything would be to implicate her self, to implicate Walt, to get them further into trouble…. She just had to sit there and take it. But then to have her sister think she was such an awful person, that she had to remove her child from the house, is every mother’s nightmare. It was just an extremely hard scene to shoot. We had to shoot with what we call the dummy baby, the rubber baby. But then occasionally for close-ups, we did put the real baby in. And just the idea of any kind of struggle going on between two sisters over a child — you don’t have to stretch very far for that to affect you. It was hard for us to maintain our composure throughout the day. And it’s just heartbreaking because those sisters are like war buddies. They were tremendously close and bonded, so for them to be torn apart like that was excruciating.”