3 Actors Who Almost Played Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman Before Aaron Paul

Bert and Ernie. Mulder and Scully. Jesse and Walt. Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) are one of the greatest television couples of all time, but their incredible journey has almost been cut short more than once, both on and off screen. Although Jesse would go on to be the heart and soul of Breaking Bad, series creator Vince Gilligan had originally planned to kill him off at the end of the first season. However, the chemistry between Paul and Cranston was just too good to pass up, and Jesse became a much bigger part of the series, lasting until the end of the series and even into his own follow-up film, El Camino.

However, AMC originally had trouble casting Paul as the kind-hearted and foul-mouthed meth dealer. In fact, three other well-known actors who were preferred by the network competed against him. In a 2013 behind-the-scenes interview, the series' casting director Dawn Steinberg finally revealed the actors who almost played Jesse Pinkman instead of Aaron Paul, and they're honestly pretty surprising.

In the interview, Steinberg explained that the show's creatives had some actors tested against Paul, but the network had doubts about him:

“We tested Aaron Paul against Penn Badgley, Reid Scott and Colin Hanks, is what I want to say. And it was clear that it was Aaron Paul (who was supposed to play Jesse) in the rehearsal room. You just know it. You feel it. You feel it – you watch an actor audition, and it's almost like he's not himself anymore. We had to fight tooth and nail against what the network called it.

By “Spelling,” the executives meant that they thought Paul looked too much like someone who would be on one of Aaron Spelling's TV shows like “Beverly Hills, 90210” and that he was too “handsome” to go along with it work dark drug drama. However, these other options seem really strange since none of the actors mentioned could have portrayed Pinkman the way Paul did. Plus, they're all good-looking in their own way, especially “You” star Penn Badgley very conventionally handsome. Reid Scott is also an odd choice, as it's hard to imagine the guy best known for playing Dan on Veep delivering Jesse's lines.

As strange as Badgley or Reid would have been, the strangest potential Jesse of all might be “Fargo” star Colin Hanks, the son of actor Tom Hanks. For one thing, Colin looks a lot like his famous father, which would have made it pretty incredible to hear him say “Yo, b****” over and over again, but he also just has a completely different energy than Paul. Luckily, the team behind Breaking Bad really fought for him, to the point where Steinberg said, “Sony almost didn't do the pilot because we really threatened them and said, 'It has to be Aaron Paul.' '“

Since Breaking Bad, Paul has done a few other fun projects, including episodes of Black Mirror and a role in the HBO sci-fi series Westworld. His performances carry a kind of wounded soulfulness regardless of the characters he plays, and that's one of the reasons he was so perfect as Pinkman. He helped transform the broken young man into much more than just a goofy caricature of a drug dealer, and Breaking Bad is all the better for it.