Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris: “How did Vince [Gilligan] know I could do the character Hank evolved into?”

Fans of AMC’s Breaking Bad are eagerly anticipating the series’ eight final episodes starting on Sunday.  Dean Norris, who plays Walter White’s unassuming brother-in-law Hank, is still somewhat surprised at the things he’s been allowed to do on the show. “I always thought to myself, ‘How did Vince [Gilligan, showrunner]

dean-norris-breaking-badFans of AMC’s Breaking Bad are eagerly anticipating the series’ eight final episodes starting on Sunday.  Dean Norris, who plays Walter White’s unassuming brother-in-law Hank, is still somewhat surprised at the things he’s been allowed to do on the show.

“I always thought to myself, ‘How did Vince [Gilligan, showrunner] know I could do the character Hank evolved into?’” Norris said in an interview with Yahoo! News.  “It’s not that he re-auditioned me and said, ‘OK, now let’s do some serious stuff and see how you handle it.’  Based on what I did in Season One, I couldn’t understand what he could’ve seen in me to allow him to write what he wrote later.”

It’s true Hank’s character started out “as a typical kind of cop character.”  Even Gilligan admits that he was initially “a bit of a mechanical construct.”

But Hank has grown to be the man that might just take down Walter’s drug empire.  Even though the show is ending, Norris has already found another gig starring on CBS’s Under the Dome.  He’s usually cast as a military or cop kind of guy.

“Fortunately, there are a lot of those roles around,” he said.

Breaking Bad airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC, and Under the Dome airs on CBS, Mondays at 10 p.m.

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