‘Breaking Bad’ Star Bryan Cranston and Others Mourn RJ Mitte: ‘I’ll Miss You, Son’
I keep thinking about the word "son" in Bryan Cranston's tribute. For years, millions of us watched those two at the breakfast table, Walter White awkwardly flipping eggs for a kid who just wanted his dad to see him. That scene was fiction, but the grief in Cranston's message sounds entirely real. The Breaking Bad cast has always talked about the show as a family, and now we're watching that family lose one of its own.
RJ Mitte carried a kind of visibility that mattered. He played a teenager with cerebral palsy, and he had cerebral palsy himself. That's rare, and it gave the role a weight it couldn't have had otherwise. The tributes from Aaron Paul and Dean Norris suggest he was as warm off-screen as he seemed on it.
I'd want to know more about what he was working on lately, and how he'd want to be remembered. For now, the image that stays with me is Cranston calling him son, a reminder that the people we watch on screen can become part of our own emotional furniture, and that the actors feel it too.