By Alan Sepinwall. As Better Call Saul headed into its homestretch, fans were abuzz with how the acclaimed Breaking Bad prequel would end. And, most importantly, exactly when, how, and why would Jimmy McGill, a shady but mostly decent attorney, fully transform into the amoral version of Saul Goodman we knew from the previous show? Then, on July 27, , a shocking real-world development put into question whether the series would get any kind of ending at all.
In this exclusive excerpt from my new book, Saul Goodman v. I was back in L. After shutting down for a few days, we just had no idea what his status was going to be. I talked to his wife, Naomi. It was a great feeling of helplessness, of not knowing what was going to happen next. Please send me a script so I can study up. That was an awful time. Rosa Estrada was our medical advisor, and then she was in charge of all of our Covid stuff.
That was the experience. You think about Better Call Saul , he has five- or page scenes, sometimes a couple of them a week. And he prepares like crazy for those. He knows all the dialogue. He knows all the beats. We had to really think about how we were going to handle that. I was in Albuquerque for when he came back. It was such a feeling to have him walk onto the stage, and the way he talked to the crew, and the emotional intelligence he had about what people were feeling.
I think he was more worried about what everybody else was feeling than anything about himself. The first shot we did was the very first shot you see of him in the season, a little pickup from that scene in the hotel room where they wake up together. It was very tough for everybody. Or if he could come back, but in a very limited way? Not really. So we were only down for three or four days, and then the crew was back to work and shooting.
And they were shooting the scene that comes immediately after Lalo has shot Howard. We were ready to dump the whole thing. It was too big to really kind of think it through. If we had had something that was physically challenging, we would have had to figure out ways to shoot it so we would use more of a double.
