Aaron Paul remembers clearly the summer he thought his career was over. He was 27 years old when he landed his biggest gig to date, playing Amanda Seyfried’s do-gooder boyfriend in HBO’s Mormon family saga, Big Love. It wasn’t a huge role, but it was significant – a step up, surely, from the bit parts and commercials he had jobbed through for 10 years, since loading up his faded gold Toyota Corolla in Boise, Idaho and driving 800 miles south to Los Angeles. But, he says, “I was the lowest I ever was. I had a breakdown, not knowing what I was going to do.”
Paul, now 34, left home at 17, the youngest of four siblings; he had been saving up for his big move since before he even started high school. And yet, having finally made it, he realised he couldn’t afford to live. “I didn’t come from any money, but even when I was on Big Love – people think you’re on a series and you’re making bank.” How much was he making? “For an episode, after tax? $600.” In the end, he had to buckle and ask his parents for help. “They had to pay my rent three months in a row – and that was so much for them.”
Thankfully, a few weeks later Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad script arrived. He nailed the audition. Whereas Bryan Cranston’s meth-cooking, murder-happy chemistry teacher, Walter White, was terrifying to watch, Paul’s role as Jesse Pinkman – White’s partner in crime, and a man progressively broken season by season – tested the audience’s capacity for empathy to its limits. Watching his transformation over the course of the show’s five seasons – full of cocksure, swaggering, puppyish bounce at the start, but reduced to a dead-eyed, leaden ghost by the end – was truly harrowing. Gilligan piled weights on to Pinkman’s soul and shoulders, and Paul’s performance was extraordinary – underrated, perhaps, only because it was played opposite Cranston’s “everyday masterclass in acting”.
“I love Jesse,” he says when I meet him at a cartoonishly decadent London hotel. “I loved playing him, I miss him. My favourite job hands down – and I think I can speak for everyone involved – was Breaking Bad. Everyone involved, from top to bottom, we were all running to work. We couldn’t wait to get there, we were all very proud to be a part of it. It was so good.”
This would seem a sure sign that Paul had signed on for Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spinoff that Gilligan is currently shooting in New Mexico. Indeed, previous interviews have quoted him as saying he is on board, but he now claims he isn’t. Was there some drama behind the scenes? “I wish I could tell you something exciting, but honestly there is nothing happening with me and that show.” And then, keeping all bases covered: “I would love to be a part of it. Who knows if or when that’s going to happen, but that’s definitely out in the open in the writers’ room.”
Still, it’s unusual for a star of a show as career-defining as Breaking Bad to seem so keen to talk about it, despite years of doing so and having a new career to promote. But Paul deliberately pre-empts it. Before we even sit down, he tells me a well-rehearsed anecdote about Cranston texting him the day after shooting ended to say: “I miss you already.” And he wants to talk about specific scenes – getting real-life concussion after one of Jesse’s on-screen beatings; how Jesse go-karting alone was one of his saddest moments. Even a digression on his love for indie-rock band Arcade Fire and the experience of going up on stage with them earlier this year is punctuated with him saying: “I’m the first to admit it: if it wasn’t for Breaking Bad I would be nowhere near that stage.”
So far, he has embraced the fame Breaking Bad has brought him. He famously went out to meet and greet a busload of tourists on a Hollywood tour outside his home; he also tweets back to his fans constantly, and says that although “five years ago you used to be able to do what you want without every single person seeing it, social media is amazing. It’s an interesting world we live in, and I love it.”
It’s a typically upbeat Aaron Paul spin on things, but to prove it, he tells me about meeting David Beckham the night before and asking for a selfie to send to his wife to make her jealous, then feeling incredulous that Beckham said yes – but only if he could do the same. “I’m like, ‘Yes you CAN. Tell her I said Hi! Send her my love!’ I love my wife to death, but David Beckham is an attractive man.” Then there’s his excitement when telling me about hosting acoustic mini-concerts at home after tweeting some of his favourite artists. “We’ve had Angus and Julia Stone – it was beautiful, candles in front of the fire. We had Jake Bugg, too.”
Music of the earnest, indie flavour is a big part of Paul’s life, and he routinely claims “concerts” as his only addiction. He met his wife, Lauren Parsekian (a charity campaigner, and the daughter of actor Debra Kelly), at the Coachella music festival in California three years ago. He later proposed to her on New Year’s Eve in Paris. Last year, they had a Parisian Carnival-themed wedding, “because our first kiss was on a ferris wheel at Coachella, so that’s where the carnival came from, and we got engaged in Paris. We wanted a wedding where everyone is dressed to the nines, all the guys in tuxedos, canes, top hats!”
Paul has yet to make good in film on the promise of his talent on TV. A few small-budget non-hits (including Smashed and an adaptation of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down) and the petrol-head blockbuster Need for Speed have failed to do him justice. (Although, as a result of promoting the last one, he is proudly number one in Top Gear’s celebrity lap-racing leaderboard). His new Netflix show is an animated comedy, BoJack Horseman, in which Will Arnett plays a washed-up 90s TV star who happens to be half-horse and half-human. Paul, who plays the sidekick, Todd, gamely explains the concept. The takeaway? “This is definitely not a cartoon for kids. They should stay away from this” – and that Arnett and Amy Sedaris and Naomi Watts are “the BEST. It’s been so much fun.”
What’s next for Paul? “My heart is in independent film-making,” he says. “For me, it’s where the fun, gritty storytelling is being told. Movies are either $200m epics or little passion projects.” Like most of his contemporaries, he is desperate to work with “Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, my GOD”. Coming up first, though, is Triple Nine, a heist action flick with Kate Winslet, and Exodus, Ridley Scott’s hyped biblical epic, in which Paul will play Joshua, opposite Christan Bale as Moses.
Is he religious? After all, his father was a Baptist minister, and he says it was starry-eyed ambition that led him to leave home while still a green, eager teenager; an easy assumption might be that a conservative upbringing helped propel him out.
“I definitely had a very religious upbringing. My father was just instilling good morals into us at a very young age, and it wasn’t super-strict, but it was a loving, warm household. My father was performing every week in front of an audience. He 100% believed it, of course, but it was great to watch. It was entertaining in a very positive way.” It’s the only time in our conversation he sounds defensive. “We read the Bible multiple times. As children we had to memorise our scriptures, but it wasn’t a bad thing. My parents knew kids were going to sneak out of the house, so they would say, ‘If you’re going to sneak out, that’s fine, go ahead. But please leave a note and let us know where you are so we’re not panicked.’” There are long emphases at random in his sentences at this point. “That said, it didn’t make me want to sneak out so much. When you’re a kid and there are so many rules, you kind of wanna break those rules. I mean, I definitely did … but not so much.” He reminds me that he had his first beer at 19 years old – “and by that point I had been living alone in LA for two years”.
And what about his beliefs now? “Oh man, I don’t know. We’re all very fortunate to exist. I’m obsessed with all things universe. My wife and I are constantly talking about how special and exciting and strange it is that we’re living on a globe spinning so fast, just floating in the middle of the universe.” Does he think people underestimate him? He laughs. “I think people would be surprised that I have daily conversations about the universe, space and time.”
• BoJack Horseman will be available to stream on Netflix from 22 August.
