What could Vince Gilligan do after ‘Breaking Bad?’
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“Breaking Bad” fans feeling the post-premiere buzz after watching Walt and Jesse wriggle out of another nasty pickle know they’re in for a season’s worth of dark motives and close calls from series brainchild Vince Gilligan.
What else might they get from the creator when he’s done making mayhem in New Mexico?
Gilligan and longtime producer Mark Johnson have recently been discussing plans for Gilligan’s post-’Bad’ career. Among them is a return to the big screen: The pair have talked about bringing back Gilligan, who co-wrote “Hancock,” to direct ‘Convenience,’ another script he wrote. It’s about teenagers who work at a convenience store but get in over their heads when they meet employees on a prison-release program. (Think a sort of PG-13 ‘Superbad.’)
Also in the mix for the former ‘X-Files’ writer is a comedy called ‘2-Face,’ a script Gilligan wrote several years ago about a man with split personality disorder: one of them a raging racist and the other a sensitive altruist. (The project has been in development for years, at one point with Will Ferrell, but is still very much alive.) Like ‘Convenience, ‘2-Face’ would be a switch into comedy, though with a dark streak that ‘Breaking Bad’ fans would recognize.
It will be at least a few weeks before AMC decides whether to bring back ‘Bad’ for a fifth season. (If the show keeps getting the acclaim, don’t bet against it.) Gilligan is heavily involved with all of the series episodes, even editing them himself, which means that it’s nearly impossible for him to take a break from the show to direct a film or work on another series as long as ‘Bad’ is on the air.
But that doesn’t mean he’s not thinking about it. At the “Breaking Bad” premiere a few weeks ago, Gilligan told Show Tracker that he does have some other ambitions. “I’d really like to do a western, something really hard-edged,’ he said, then, after a pause, “but the truth is I guess we kind of do a western now.”
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--Steven Zeitchik
