Aaron Paul is a 36-year-old actor who came to prominence playing crystal meth dealer and producer Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad, for which he won three Emmy awards. In Eye in the Sky he plays a drone pilot ordered to blow up an Al-Shabaab cell in Kenya.
Eye in the Sky is dedicated to the memory of Alan Rickman, who co-starred. Did you get to meet him?
Sadly we never had the opportunity. This was the second film he and I did together, but I never had the privilege of meeting the man. I’m very blessed to have shared a screen with him.
Your character refuses to fire his drone because he is likely to kill an innocent girl. But if he doesn’t act, the suicide bombers he’s targeting might kill many more innocents. Do you have a moral position on that dilemma?
It’s impossible not to throw our own emotions into the mix. I feel I side with my character on this, that’s why I’m so happy I don’t have to be in his shoes and I’m not part of the decision-making process. He’s just trying to bide time, to wait until the last possible moment to release his payload.
Has there been much debate in the US about the use of drone warfare?
Absolutely, there’s been a discussion ever since drones started flying. But if you talk to our director [Gavin Hood], who’s been doing endless amounts of research for the past three or four years, he informed me that even when the longbow was created and they started using that in battles, people thought it was terribly unfair. How are you peacefully pulling back a longbow from across a giant field in the comfort of your bunker? Drones are a more dramatic version of that.
You grew up in Idaho, the son of a baptist minister. What kind of childhood was that?
It was incredible. I appreciate it much more now being away from it. I grew up on the lake, floating the rivers, nothing but mountains and streams and wildlife and that sort of thing. I was always snowboarding from a very young age. And you think, oh God I can’t wait to get out to live a more exciting life. But now living in Los Angeles since I was 17, I cannot wait to get back to Idaho.
You moved to LA as a teenager. Was that a lonely time of your life?
I didn’t fall in love with Los Angeles as quickly as I had imagined I would. It took me a good two to three years to really love the city. Now I’m madly in love with it. There’s a lot of Los Angeles that at first glance you’re terrified by, a lot of fake people and the glitz and glam, that’s not really my cup of tea. Then eventually you get your core group of friends who you love and trust. I wouldn’t call it lonely. I was fighting for something. I was trying to get my foot inside that door. And eventually the door was opened.
Did you ever think of quitting?
There was a lot of fear. I never wanted to quit. I had many ups and downs in the business. I started doing commercials to pay my bills, then I stopped doing that because I wanted to focus on guest spots on TV. If you have a lull in working it’s hard to keep up and pay your bills. Right before Breaking Bad was probably the lowest point in my career. That was the first time I had ever asked for any money from my family, and my family didn’t have any money to give. But they managed to get some money together and pay my rent for three months in a row. That was incredibly heartbreaking for me.
Jesse Pinkman was a wonderful character, and one of his distinctive characteristics was his deep lazy voice. How close is it to yours?
I took a while to really know who Jesse was. In the pilot he just came off as this druggy burnout. I wanted him to stand out. I know this kid says “Yo” and “bitch” far too much. I wanted to create a character around that. His voice came to me throughout the first season of the show. And I got a true sense of it in the second season.
Is it difficult staying in one character over so many years? Does it begin to possess you?
A lot of times it would be difficult but with a show like Breaking Bad it actually made it easier, because these characters were so well developed and absolutely on the page right there in front of us for the taking. The more scripts we had the more we figured out who these characters were. You are able to tell an incredibly descriptive narrative in 62 hours of television.
I read that at one stage you were dreaming as Jesse…
That’s true. I truly lived and breathed every moment and then some of what you saw on screen. It was almost impossible not to think as Jesse, to really transform into that guy. So at night there would be times when I would wake up in a panic as Jesse, and bad things were happening to me. Which actually I was so into. I never had that experience before of dreaming as the character.
There’s talk of you turning up on the prequel, Better Call Saul. Do you have any news about that?
All I can say is that we’ve had multiple conversations about that possibility and if it were to happen it would happen for absolutely all the right reasons. They wouldn’t want to throw Jesse in just so the audience could see him in the background. He’d have to really enter the story. And as I’m such a huge fan of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, if they did figure out a way to make that happen I’d be very excited.
What do you do to relax?
Any chance I have just to be at my house, I take it. I’m never at home, I’m always travelling. I never work in LA. Being home is really a vacation for me and my wife. Music is our obsession. I fell in love with my wife at a music festival. We have concerts inside our living room. Whenever we’re in town, we track down artists playing in Los Angeles and just reach out to their tour manager and see if they’d like to play our living room.
Do you think you’d be able to make crystal meth to a reasonable quality if you were required?
Absolutely not. I wouldn’t even know how to blow myself up. I would be terrible at it.
Eye in the Sky is out 15 April
