Bryan Cranston's Malcolm In The Middle Role Almost Forced A Major Breaking Bad Change

If there is one defining image from "Breaking Bad," the groundbreaking AMC saga about a lowly high school chemistry teacher building a meth empire, it's not an RV riddled with bullet holes, a bathtub full of dissolved flesh, or an elaborate chemistry set churning out brilliant blue crystal meth.

No, it's the image of Bryan Cranston standing in the middle of the New Mexico desert wearing nothing but a green button down shirt tucked into his white tighty-whities. This cold open dropped us smack dab into the frantic world of the show, but Cranston almost forced this image to be removed because of how inadvertently similar it was to his other iconic role: put-upon father figure Hal in "Malcolm in the Middle."

When looking back on the pilot's 10 year anniversary for Yahoo Entertainment, Cranston brought the connection to Gilligan's attention, thinking that maybe he had "subliminally" made the choice of wardrobe and suggested to Gilligan that they avoid treading that same territory. But "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan admits that he had "forgotten that Bryan's character ... had spent so much time, not just in his underpants, but in his tighty-whities." Cranston was intent on losing the tighty-whities and grilled Gilligan on why this image was so important to him, but Gilligan admits he "wimped out" on the day of shooting the pivotal scene and could only explain that he thought it was funny.

That wasn't a good enough answer for Cranston, but as he continued to mull over their options, he ended up coming around to the idea by tying it back thematically to his character's emotional state.

Gilligan was so attached to this image of Walt in his underwear because it was one of the first he wrote, long before he even cast Cranston in the role. Cranston agreed the idea was funny, which is precisely why he'd been donning that look for seven years on "Malcolm in the Middle." But even as he explored the idea of wearing sweatpants or boxers instead, something gnawed at him about why this decision wasn't just a joke, but spoke to something lurking under the surface of his character.

"I always try to find the emotional core," says Cranston. "And with Walt, it was depression." He realized that the reason Walt was making all these horrible, reckless decisions was that his "emotional core was calloused over by years of indifference and disappointment." Walt had given up on a better life for himself years ago, leading to a bitter marriage with his wife Skyler (aka the real hero of the show), and by the time we find him in the pilot of "Breaking Bad," he's given up on just about everything.

So while the image of Hal in his tighty-whities was a joke because it made him look like "the biggest boy of the family," for Walt, it was a visual signifier that he had given up on bothering to look presentable anymore. And this dichotomy was what brought Cranston back on board. "To take the same exact underwear in a comedy to make [the character] funny and in a drama to make it depressing and sad?" he explained.

Cranston ended up wearing those tighty-whities in "Breaking Bad," and with a "Malcolm in the Middle" revival on the way, perhaps he'll don them once again.