‘Breaking Bad’: Walter White Landed His Incredible Pizza Toss in One Take
Breaking Bad once had Walter White toss an unsliced pizza onto his roof in a fit of frustration. It’s become one of the show’s more iconic scenes, and has even spawned copycat pranksters pulling the same stunt on the same house — which happens to be occupied by real people. Since then, Bryan Cranston has dished on how the toss went down, and how he managed to get it up on the roof in just a single take.
‘Breaking Bad’: Walter White pizza toss took just one take
Season 3 of Breaking Bad featured an episode entitled “Caballo sin Nombre,” in which Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston, attempts to reconcile with his wife. He brings a pizza to the door and tries to convince her to chat with him.
She declines, and in a fit of rage he tosses the pizza up onto the roof of their home. One might expect the Breaking Bad star to have given the pizza toss multiple takes, but Bryan Cranston was able to manage it in just one go.
During an interview with fans hosted by AMC, which has since been deleted, Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston explained how it all went down.
“That was the world’s largest pizza. I had never seen a pizza that big before. It was a real pizza, and they really serve it,” said Cranston of Walter White’s massive pizza.
“And they were prepared with special effects, a lightweight rubber pizza, there was a prop guy ready to pull a fake pizza up to the roof. We had all kinds of things ready to go. But I said, let me just try it,” Cranston explained.
Cranston went on to explain that when he landed Walter White’s pizza toss on the first go, everyone was stunned, including Cranston himself.
“So, I’m coming out and I’m p*ssed and I fling the pizza and I didn’t even look at it. I fling the pizza and I get in the car and I drive away. And I did all that and I hear clapping as I’m driving back. I look up and there’s the pizza. They said if they had marked where would be the optimal place for the pizza to land, it would be where it landed,” he added.
“One of those freak accidents that’s like ‘Here it is, we did it! There it is!’ And sure enough, they said ‘let’s do another take,’ and it never happened again.”
Vince Gilligan explains why Walter White’s pizza was unsliced
At the time of the episode, the pizza became a hotly debated topic. Breaking Bad fans wanted to know why the pizza was unsliced. Vince Gilligan knew that was going to happen, so he managed to work in an explanation for the Breaking Bad pizza.
“Was Badger and Skinny Pete’s conversation at Jesse’s party about the pizzas not being sliced written in after the fact to explain how Walters pizza landed on the roof intact? Everyone knows a sliced pizza would have come apart,” asked a Breaking Bad fan during a Reddit AmA.
“Yes! 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),” explained Gilligan.
“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!” he added.
