Full transcript: RJ Mitte on London Real
0:00 Brian Rose: This week on London Real, we have the actor, model and anti-bullying advocate RJ Mitte.
RJ Mitte: For me, our job is to affect an emotional response in someone. Our job is to breathe life into something that necessarily has no life.
Can’t is an idea. It’s an infection. There are so many poisonous words in our world.
That’s what they teach you in acting. It’s living in the moment.
Brian Rose: Do you like that term, disabled? Because the way you described it just about 20 minutes ago, it’s enabled. That whole thing enables you.
RJ Mitte: The White family was a real family. That was an honest family. People aren’t perfect.
A lot of people are like, “Oh, you had Breaking Bad. You have it made. It’s done.” No, that just means I have to do something better.
Brian Rose: On Sunday, London Real presents RJ Mitte: Breaking Bad.
RJ Mitte: That big job may never come unless you build it.
Brian Rose: This week on the show we have the actor, model and anti-bullying advocate RJ Mitte. Yes, you would have known him as Walt Jr on the television show Breaking Bad, in my opinion one of the greatest television shows of all time. And the thing about RJ is that he grew up on that show. We met him so many years ago as a young teenager, and we watched him grow up next to some of the greatest actors of our generation while they were cooking up copious amounts of methamphetamine. It’s a show that I love. I think the cinematography is some of the best there is in the business.
But RJ is a fascinating guy because, quite honestly, he keeps moving and he’s not one to rest on his laurels. He does runway modelling in Milan. He is really outspoken about cerebral palsy and about anti-bullying, and he has a fascinating way of looking at his disability, or, as I like to say during the episode, his enability, in that he looks at his cerebral palsy as something that he conquers every day and that empowers him.
I loved my time talking with RJ and I was super excited to have him on the show. We came in on a Saturday night here at London Real Studios and just made it happen, because it was super important, and he has such a great London Real type of message about how to learn, how to push yourself and, quite honestly, how to keep working. He’s not the kind of actor that sits around waiting for the phone to ring. He’s like, you’ve got to be out there doing things. You have to go out for work. You have to be constantly doing different things, like working in the fashion industry. This boy is always grinding, and I loved sitting down and talking with him.
So you might have first met him as Walt Jr, but now you’re going to know him as an accomplished actor and a really interesting human, a great guy with a fantastic way of looking at life. So again, super honoured. Thank you, RJ, for coming on, and I think everyone’s going to get a ton out of this episode.
3:17 [London Real promo removed]
7:56 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is the actor and model RJ Mitte, who is best known for his role in the television show Breaking Bad as Walter White’s disabled son, Walt Jr, one of the few characters to remain alive during all five seasons of what I consider to be one of the greatest television shows of all time. Maybe second to The Wire; that’s debatable. This year you starred in the film Dixieland, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, in your first non-handicapped leading role. When you’re not acting, you are modelling for Gap and walking the runways of Milan, Berlin and New York. You are also the face of the Cut the Bull anti-bullying campaign in support of children. RJ, welcome to the show.
RJ Mitte: Thank you for having me. It’s definitely a pleasure.
Brian Rose: You mentioned earlier that the Americans look at the Brits and the Brits look at the Americans. I guess over here we admire the scale and the things Americans are able to do, and over there it seems like people look to French cinema for inspiration. I know you spend time in Milan and Berlin, and I think Americans in some way always feel like the French and the British invented certain things.
RJ Mitte: Well, I think the French, British and German cultures have been around for a lot longer than the United States. We’re a fairly new country, if you think of the grand scheme of the world. And I feel like in the United States we have a tendency to go, “Oh yeah, that’s too far. We should not push that envelope. We should not push people in that direction.” When it’s French cinema, they don’t care. They’ll put whatever they want on screen, sex, drugs, anything, and they will go all out. Same thing with London, same thing with Germany. They’re more willing to push the envelope and put something out there that’s not necessarily politically correct. And that’s what makes or breaks a show, that political correctness or incorrectness.
Brian Rose: Yeah.
RJ Mitte: Because not everyone is like that. That’s not what this world is made of. We’re made of mistakes. We’re made of our flaws and a lot of different things that make us unique as humans. But people all want to be so proper and posh, and it doesn’t work, especially in this industry. You can’t put this business in a formula. You can try, but as soon as you start trying, the formula changes and you have to find something else. When you’re pushing the envelope, you’re finding that new thing. It’s not always going to work, and people aren’t always going to like it. But people will find the little things that they like, and you use those little things to create a bigger picture.
10:45 Brian Rose: In all the interviews I hear from you, you’re always talking about, “I’ve got to keep working. It’s about the future. It’s about the next role. It’s about what I need to do.”
RJ Mitte: It is. One role can project your career, and that’s what happened when Breaking Bad gave me a career, but that’s not what’s going to make me me. Yes, it will define a lot of what I will be doing, but that’s not what I want to be solely known for. I don’t want to just live on, “Yeah, I was on Breaking Bad, remember that.” I want to be like, “No, I wasn’t just on Breaking Bad. I did this and this and this.”
And I think as actors we shouldn’t just stick to one part of this industry, because this industry is not just one part. It’s made up of many pieces. I feel like we’re all, you included, under the same umbrella of entertaining, an art form, growing and learning. That’s acting, that’s modelling, that’s producing, that’s directing, anything from painting to whatever we define as an art. I feel like even journalism and talking and the way we conduct our business is really under that same umbrella.
12:08 Brian Rose: I once heard that with great art, half the people hate it and half the people love it. The last thing you want to do is make something that everyone has no reaction to.
RJ Mitte: See, that’s the thing. If they have no reaction, that’s a bad sign for me and for what we do. I look at our job as invoking an emotional response in someone, good or bad, happy or sad, whatever it is. Our job is to make them feel that way in that moment. And this was the thing with Breaking Bad: in the beginning a lot of people hated the show, but those same people came around four or five years later to love it. A lot of that comes down to the mindset of where people are in their life and their world, from friends and family to financial responsibilities to stress. That affects what they want to watch on TV, whether it’s happy or sad or suspenseful, and I think that all changes with the times.
Brian Rose: So why do you think it took so many people a few seasons to get their heads around Breaking Bad?
RJ Mitte: Well, we came out at essentially a very dark time for the world. We came out when everyone was losing their jobs. The bubble popped. We were one of the very few shows that survived the writers’ strike. The show was very dark, and they actually toned it down for the network, because people were complaining that it was too hard, that it was something they didn’t want to see. At the time people were in the same position as Bryan’s character, Heisenberg, Walter White.
Brian Rose: They were in that broke, bad times.
RJ Mitte: They were losing their money. They were losing their homes. It was bad times. It was, “What am I going to do to provide for my family? Where am I going to find a job to replace the one I just lost, to keep my family living that way?” And with Walter White, he’s dying. He has no money. He’s about to spend whatever little money he’s saved on a funeral. A lot of people weren’t dealing with it to that extent, but they were dealing with it. They were wondering, “Where am I going to go? How am I going to make money?”
And about four years later, slowly, we increased our viewership, because that was changing and people were realising they do have a way out. They do have a way to see the future, and this isn’t just going to be the end where they have to move back in with mum and dad; they can live independently. They just have to work. And Bryan’s character, Walt, did work, just on a different path. I think over time people evolved and were more willing to be lenient towards the show and its content, because the content itself was really hard. What’s funny is I know a lot of people who were addicts, who have dealt with addiction, and still today they’re like, “I cannot watch the show,” because of the content.
Brian Rose: Yeah.
RJ Mitte: And that’s when you know you’ve done your job right and you’ve affected people emotionally.
15:21 Brian Rose: Right, because you very accurately portrayed methamphetamine addiction in a few episodes, and I’m sure that really hits home. A lot of the time there’s the Hollywood version of what a drug user looks like, which is sometimes comical and very stereotypical, but in Breaking Bad you went pretty deep.
RJ Mitte: They tried to create it the best way. It’s even worse than what it looks like. But we tried to portray honestly the effects of what these drugs do to people. And not just what the drugs do, but what being in that world does to them. Anything corrosive like that corrodes who they are. It doesn’t just corrode their body, it corrodes their soul, and over time you are affected. We did get a lot of hate mail because of it, a lot of threats and a number of different things. But those people were never the person actually facing the addiction. It was someone who was affected by that person.
What I think we could probably have leaned on more, and I don’t think a lot of people realised it, is how it affects the family, and how one action that you take affects the lives of many. No one really understands the power that they have any more, and I think that needs to change, because we have so much power. It’s not just people in my position and your position. Everyone around the world has power. They just choose not to tap into it. They choose not to see it for themselves. They sit idle and watch people who think they have power. You may think you have power, and you may have a little bit of power, but everyone has this power. You just choose the level that you plateau at.
17:20 Brian Rose: You pretty much grew up on the show, which is a fascinating thing to happen, and potentially a dangerous thing, although you seem to be flying out of it, no problem. I was wondering if you could take me back to that day when you’re shooting the pilot and you’re looking around and you’ve got Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn and Dean Norris and Betsy Brandt, and the script that some say was very much right on for you. Do you remember thinking this is special? I know you didn’t have a frame of reference.
RJ Mitte: Oh, we all knew that this was a special project. There was no doubt in our minds. We just never knew that it would be as popular as it was. The only reason I’m an actor today is because of the show. The only reason I’m still in this industry is because of the show. And the only reason I really have a career is because of the show. I could never have imagined the show being what it is now.
And I do remember the pilot. It was my favourite episode to shoot. It was my favourite episode in general to be a part of. It’s one of the reasons why I’m still in this business, and I fell in love with what I do because of that pilot. It really was an opportunity of a lifetime, being a part of this cast. I remember sitting in an ensemble scene with all five of us, all getting coverage, shooting all day, and that’s what I love: that camaraderie and that drive. When you’re able to see people who are so passionate about what they do after 30 and 40 years of working in this industry since they were children, that’s something special.
A lot of people don’t have their passion any more. They just look at it as a business: “All right, turn around. Where’s the next project? Give me the next script. Let’s do that.” But no: give me the right script. Let’s look at the script. What can we do to the script? How can we make these scenes better? That’s what you really need, that passion. People who’ve lost it have lost so much more than just their passion. But we had that, and we loved what we were doing. We knew we had something special, the pilot was definitely a testament to that, and that’s what really set the tone for the whole show.
Brian Rose: I remember watching season four, where everyone’s character arcs started really stretching their legs, you and Walter and Walt’s wife and everyone, and I kept thinking to myself, how did they know these actors were going to be able to deliver in these huge ways four years later? Did they just take a gamble, because everyone seemed to deliver?
RJ Mitte: Well, I think they knew Bryan, they knew Anna, they knew Dean. I think I was the only one they were really gambling on, because I had only been working for about six months to a year when I booked Breaking Bad. I’d just started acting. I was 12 turning 13 when I started acting, and I was 13 turning 14 when I started Breaking Bad. I think I was the only person they were really gambling on as an actor to deliver an arc. Bryan had been in the industry for quite a while, Anna as well. Everyone except me had this long history of theatre and television and film and being in the arts, and I did not.
20:45 Brian Rose: How do you not get intimidated when you’re at the dinner table acting with these people?
RJ Mitte: See, the thing is, I didn’t think about that. If you’re busy being intimidated, you’re not living in the moment. If you’re busy living in a realm of fear, “Oh my God, this is Bryan Cranston and Anna Gunn,” you’re not doing your job. You’re not thinking about where you’re at. You’re not playing that character. You’re caught up in actuality, in real life. For me, I live in that scene. When I act and perform, I try not to bring my outside world into it. My world is that world and I live in that world. That is my character; my character is me. As soon as we’ve wrapped, I go back to actuality, back to my real life. But when I’m in that moment, I try not to drag that in there, and I try to keep those two things separate.
Brian Rose: Is that the essence of acting, being in the moment?
RJ Mitte: I mean, that’s what they teach you in acting. It’s living in the moment. That’s what they taught me in acting. And I feel like in life, if you’re not present, there’s a gloss and you don’t see what’s around you, and we have a tendency not to be present. I’m always very observant. I try to always observe and be in the moment and live what I’m doing, even off set. I think a lot of people don’t do that, and especially as actors we need to be in that moment to connect with it. For me, our job is to affect an emotional response in someone. Our job is to breathe life into something that necessarily has no life, to give it a soul, to give it a character. Not your soul, but a new soul, a different person.
That’s what I love about it. I think it’s the most amazing thing when you can go into a job and be someone completely different. I love every minute of that, and I try to take it to everything I do. There are different levels of how I behave in an interview, on set, at a photo shoot, on a runway, on the street or in a bar. I pretty much have a different character for each. I don’t do it on purpose, but naturally I tap into a different way of thinking and a different way of talking, like how I’m talking now versus how I was talking when I first walked in here. Once I’m in that moment, it just clicks for me and I do it naturally.
23:35 Brian Rose: You said being on set was like being in an acting master class. Were there any points over those years where you had a real realisation, where Vince or the director at the time or Bryan would pull you aside, or you’d see something they did and you were just like, “Oh”?
RJ Mitte: I think there was a lot of that, but it was more a process of looking and going, “OK, that’s what you do. This is how you behave. This is what you bring to the set. This is what I need to do to get to that level.” I’ll go and ask: “If you want me to change, tell me. What do you want the character to be like? What do you want out of this character? What are you needing?” That’s up to the director and the creators.
But for me, I think the main thing is looking at my surrounding environment. When I first started I was doing extra work, and I learned a lot from extra work. I didn’t play around on set. I looked at the crew, I looked at the cast, I looked at how they behaved and how they interacted, and I studied that and learned from behaviour. I love to people-watch. It’s the most amazing thing.
Brian Rose: Great actors do, right?
RJ Mitte: It’s reality television, but real. It’s so interesting to see. And I think the biggest thing is that a lot of people don’t live in the moment, and they don’t try to incorporate the things they really need to bring in to make a character: not your traits, but someone else’s traits. If you’re vigilant and you watch how people behave, how they sit, how they stand, how they talk, how they look, and you take parts of that and put them together, you create a whole different person. You also have these things in yourself, in how you behave and what you do. You find those, you find what the character’s breakdown is, and you use what you think that character would do. You give them quirks, you give them tics, you give them different ways of sitting and shuffling. For me, that’s the best way to create: by what you see, what you do and how you behave.
25:59 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about disability.
RJ Mitte: Yes.
Brian Rose: Walt Jr has cerebral palsy. It’s funny, because I read that on Wikipedia and I had to think twice. You’re introduced in the first season with the crutches and everything, but after you get to know him you do forget about it, and he’s just another fascinating character on the show. I remember one of the last scenes, where you’re in high school and you take a phone call, from Walt I think, and then you get the crutches afterwards, and I was like, “Oh, I forgot he had crutches.” Talk to me about that, and the fact that you were born with cerebral palsy. You were born not breathing, via Caesarean section…
RJ Mitte: Something like that.
Brian Rose: Something like that. So you brought knowledge of that to the role. There’s so much to talk about. Where do you start when people ask?
RJ Mitte: When it comes down to the role of Walt Jr, this is the thing not many people realise. As you watched the show, you saw the crutches first and then you saw the character. But as you evolve with this character and he grows, you no longer think about that, and you see the character for what he is. That’s the mindset we’re in now: we see the crutch or we see the chair, whatever it is, before we see the person. That’s what we need to change, and that’s what Breaking Bad changed. It gave us a different way of looking at someone who is a real person living with this, but it’s not who he is. It’s not what he is.
It’s not like I wake up every morning and go, “Oh, I have CP today, let me make everything about that.” It’s like anyone else. You wake up and you just go, and you never really think about it. I never really even thought about my disability until someone told me I was disabled. I was like, “What are you talking about?” They’re like, “Well, what’s wrong with you?” I’m like, “What’s wrong with you? I’m fine, man.” “No, you have braces on your legs. Why do you have that?” And I was like, “Oh, because of this,” and I explained it. And they’re like, “OK, but why?” And I’d be like, “Well, a number of reasons. I have it. Why not? I need it.”
And that’s something we need to change, and that’s the importance of the power of perception, of what people see on television and film, because we can change that mindset. I always like to think: what if we can affect how children perceive disability on screen? If that changes, it will affect not just their generation but generations to come, how they perceive disability and how they acknowledge it. I have a lot of friends in chairs. I have a lot of friends with crutches. And I don’t see the… well, I see it, but it’s an extension of who they are and what they can do. It’s like having a nice pair of shoes: “That’s a cool chair. Nice.” And you go on to the next thing. That’s what’s slowly changing.
29:15 When it comes to my own disability, I grew up with this. This is all I knew. I never thought it was different. I never thought it was odd, until, like I said earlier, I went to school and someone told me I was different. I learned with it. I grew up with it. And I was surrounded by people with a number of different disabilities. My mum worked in elder care and home care. My grandfather had a stroke and was fully paralysed on one side. My aunt Kitty had polio and dealt with everything from diabetes to cancer. A lot of my family were taken by cancer. So I’ve dealt with everything from long-lasting disabilities to disabilities that will kill you almost instantly.
And I don’t look at a physical challenge as a disability. I look at anything that’s hindering your life and hindering what you want to do as a disability. That can be physical. It could be mental. It can be family, friends, your environment, your work. Those in themselves can be disabilities. I don’t look at individuals with a disability; I look at everyone. We all have these challenges. And the more of a challenge it is, the more personal it is. It’s a challenge directed at you that you have to overcome. People like to put it to the side, put it to the side, and hope it goes away. But when you embrace it and utilise it, you turn it into a knowledge factor, a power factor.
For me, a disability in itself is that challenge. It’s a challenge for you to grow. It’s a challenge for you to learn something about yourself that you won’t learn without that challenge. It ranges from person to person, but I look at it as a strength, as knowledge, as something you will utilise in the long run. I wouldn’t be able to do what I do right now if it wasn’t for my CP. I would never have booked Breaking Bad. I would never have worked with the organisations I get to work with. I would never have had the same opportunities.
First of all, when I moved to Los Angeles, I would have been another face in the crowd. I would have been another actor who went out there. Well, I did it to meet kids my own age, but most people go to be an actor, to be famous, to be whatever. I would have just fallen into that category: “Oh, this is an able-bodied kid, dark hair, big eyebrows,” at the time I was about 5 foot 7, 5 foot 8. I would have fitted on a sheet and they would just have passed me around. And yes, I still fit on that sheet, and I didn’t put the CP on, but without it I would never have got the opportunity of Breaking Bad. That gave me so many more opportunities to use as a platform.
I think the quicker people look at what they have, not just physical and mental but the challenges they have in general, as a challenge they need to accept rather than a challenge they need to avoid, the further ahead they will be.
Brian Rose: Right. So accept it as an asset, and then when you overcome it, the world sees the power you have. We use a term, IP, intellectual property, where everyone has their own IP that’s yours, because, like you said, otherwise you’re in the crowd. Now you’re this special guy.
RJ Mitte: It makes you unique. It gives you another aspect, and a different way of looking at an individual, of how you process and see that person. We don’t really pay attention to our bodies. We don’t really pay attention to our mindset. We just go and go and go, and next thing you know it’s, “Oh, I feel like this. I’ve got to deal with this. Just give me something to make it go away.” But instead of just taking something to fix it, why don’t you go and look inside and fix it yourself? Break it down for yourself. We have a tendency to let our fears manipulate us. We have a tendency to fall into a category where we just go, “I can’t change this. This is me. This is what I have to deal with, and I’m going to mope about it and keep ignoring it and focus on another direction.” But what if, instead of ignoring it, you utilised it? You worked on it. You turned it to your benefit. Some people can do that and some people can’t, and that’s fine. But we all have to learn what we need to do and what we need to grow with, to better not just our environment but ourselves. We don’t always do that. We tend to take an easier road. For me, I don’t like to take the easy road. I like a little bit of a struggle. I like a challenge. For me, it’s not worth it if it comes to you easy. Nothing in life comes easy, and if you think it should, you are very mistaken, because what’s it worth? If it comes easy, what’s the value of that? There is none.
I feel like you have a tendency to just use and use and use, and then it’s all used up. But if you worked for it, and you appreciate it, and you worked towards what you truly wanted, you see the value in it. You can utilise it at a higher value, versus, “Oh yeah, this is what I got, let’s just send it out and hope for the best.” It’s like the difference between someone going into a meeting and expressing their passion for what they’re doing, versus a guy going into the meeting going, “Yeah, this is what I do. Are you going to hire me or not?” You may get by in this world a little bit with that, but will you prosper? No.
35:26 Brian Rose: Did you ever ask Vince Gilligan why he created this character? With this whole crazy script, why throw the son in?
RJ Mitte: See, my character was actually based on a friend Vince had in college, who passed away some time after. That’s really where my character came from, growing up with him and in memory of him. And I think it added that extra level of honesty to the show, because this is a real family. Not every family is going to have a meth kingpin father. Excuse me. But every family has dealt with this. Every family has someone with disabilities. Real families are not what you see on television, the happy sitcom family or the happy drama family. No, the White family was a real family. That was an honest family.
People aren’t perfect. I hate to break it to anyone in this world, but you are not a perfect individual. You have flaws. Things will come into your life that will define your outcome. Not everyone walks properly. Not everyone talks properly. You’re more of a minority if you write with great handwriting and talk very properly. How many people actually do? Very few. But real people are in this world, and that’s what we really need to cater to as performers: honesty and truth. We don’t need to lose that.
Brian Rose: Those dinner scenes you would have… I’m from America, and people look and see the pretty house and the dinner on the table, and then there’s this crazy, weird, dysfunctional relationship going on between Walter and you and Mom, and so much of it is unsaid. I just loved watching that, because that’s what my dinner table was like. It was just twisted. It might have looked OK from the outside, but there were all these weird dynamics happening.
RJ Mitte: No, but that’s every family. That’s my family. When you sit around my dinner table at the house, man, it is a show. It is definitely something. And that’s life. That’s people. You sit around with these unspoken issues going on, and you know that the person across the table is thinking exactly what you’re thinking, and you’re just sitting there. It’s like, when the kids go to bed, you’re going to get it. Or it’s the same thing for the kids, going, “Oh, Mom and Dad are fighting.” It’s this thing that makes it a real family.
And with Breaking Bad, we had a real family. We had a truthful family. We had an honest family. What we were bringing to the screen was real. It wasn’t essentially a sitcom or another TV drama. It was a truthful drama. It had honesty. It had that realism. And that’s what people need in television and film. We had that for a split second; television hit the mark, and then they kept going. We need to go back to bringing in that honesty and truth.
39:03 Brian Rose: With all the people dying in that show, did you ever worry about not making it to the end?
RJ Mitte: I wanted to die. I wanted a gory and horrible death. I wanted one of those.
Brian Rose: By whose hands?
RJ Mitte: By anyone’s hands. I wanted Walt to have a hand in something he did that made either Jesse or one of them kill his son. I wanted that whole thing. Did you ever see Four Brothers?
Brian Rose: Yeah.
RJ Mitte: Remember when one of the brothers dies?
Brian Rose: Yeah.
RJ Mitte: That type of heart-wrenching thing, where they see him and they know they need to get to him, but they physically cannot or they will die.
Brian Rose: It’s like a shootout.
RJ Mitte: Yeah, it was a shootout. They’re fighting these guys who just came in to kill them, and they’re seeing him and they just can’t get to him. I wanted something like that, where Walt had to watch him die. That would have hurt people, and that would have changed them and affected them in a way they would probably never have recovered from. And I’m happy it didn’t happen, because it wouldn’t have served the show. People probably wouldn’t have been able to watch the show if that happened. It would definitely have been too much. It would have hurt way too much, because people were already feeling that vibe with the show’s content and what it was doing and how it was portraying things. But me personally, I love that. I would have been like, “Give me your hearts.”
Brian Rose: That’s true art, right? To get that emotional.
40:57 Were you sad that it ended at five seasons?
RJ Mitte: Well, technically we have six if you really think about it. But I’m happy we had an ending. We almost never had an ending, and that would definitely have been sadder. I was sad that it was over. You know what the saddest part was? I don’t have a regular job any more. I know that sounds weird, people go, “Wait, regular job?” But I don’t have that recurring work with people. I don’t go back to that set. I don’t go back to work with people I care about. And yes, I keep finding more amazing people I love to work with and have fun working with, but I miss that environment of being able to say, “I’m going back to set to work with these awesome people for six months of the year,” and then for the rest of the six months, every job is a blessing. I don’t have that. And yes, I work all the time. I travel ten months of the year. I’m on a little bit of a tour right now. I have a break coming up, hopefully soon.
Brian Rose: But you miss that regular piece, that recurrence. You lived in New Mexico for six months of the year. By all reports, the crew and the cast were all really tight. The acting is amazing, but the visual storytelling that used to go on, I would fall off my sofa and just be like, “Wow, the time they took to make those montages.”
RJ Mitte: It was insane. What even helped is that we shot on 35mm, and that makes a world of difference, because it doesn’t just capture the scene. It captures the moment itself, and that’s what really registers. I was lucky to learn that, and I see the importance of actually being on film versus digital. Digital is amazing, and you can record and shoot all day on digital, but there’s something about film that captures and burns that moment into the film and into the cinema. That’s something I personally really appreciate.
Brian Rose: But it takes a lot longer. It takes more takes?
RJ Mitte: No, not necessarily. You don’t have as much time when you have film, because it’s, “Hold the roll, we’re out of film, we’ve got to go,” and it’s expensive. A good camera, you’re talking about half a million dollars a camera. Then with the film, you’re talking tens of thousands of dollars for one roll.
Brian Rose: So as an actor it’s harder, because you have a small window where you have to deliver.
RJ Mitte: Yeah. Whereas with digital, they’ll just roll and keep rolling: “All right, we’ll get it, keep going.” With film you have to deliver there and then. You have to work with your directors. You have to work with your DPs. You have to work with the people around you. They’re trusting you and you’re trusting them to do your job, and if you don’t, it doesn’t look good and you let everyone down. For me, it’s a group effort. It’s not all the actors and the directors. It’s the DPs, it’s lighting, it’s grip and electric. It’s a combination. On Breaking Bad, man, we had 500 people all working and driving this ship home. It was a big movement, and if one gear did not work, it threw everything off. Sometimes gears don’t work, but you can always replace a gear. And that goes for actors too. You get killed off quick, especially on Breaking Bad. You do your job or you’re going to die.
Brian Rose: Did you see people get killed who weren’t doing their job?
RJ Mitte: You know, the thing about Breaking Bad is that when you have a script people love, it goes back again to passion. Everyone on our set was 100 per cent. I think there were a couple of people who weren’t, and they got removed fairly quickly, and they weren’t big parts either. They weren’t actors. It was just small cliques, and they moved on to bigger jobs. But if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing, and you’re not doing what you want to do, you’re not going to put yourself into the work. In this industry, if you’re not putting yourself into it and you remove yourself and still try to do it, it’s not going to work. It’s not going to look good, and it’s not going to help anyone else.
Brian Rose: Right. And the way you produce a great show is that everyone has to be on their A game, down to the food, the transport, everything, so everyone feels great and everything gets done perfectly.
RJ Mitte: And everyone feels that they’re a part of it and they’re contributing. That was the thing with Breaking Bad: everyone contributed to the show. Everyone drove the show. We were all happy to be a part of the set. We were all happy to go to work and spend 15, 20 hours on set, and no one complained. No one wanted to complain. Yes, you’d get tired and you’d think, “I want to go home,” but you were ready to go to work the next day. It was that moment where you’re like, “I’m physically exhausted, I need to go to bed, but I’m ready to go back to work. I’m ready to keep driving this.”
46:42 And people have really lost that. Actors a lot of the time think, “Oh, I can call it in.” No, you’re creating. You’re living in that moment. You’re creating these characters and you’re driving this, big part, small part, whatever it is. You can make the smallest part the biggest part by little things, and you can make the biggest part the smallest part by little things. It doesn’t take a lot of lines. It takes a look. It takes an action. It takes an interaction, how you behave and what you bring to the camera. You don’t have to have a big part to make an impact.
Brian Rose: Right. People always want that, though. But yeah, I can see that. I remember some of the extras in movies.
RJ Mitte: Oh yeah. They were in it for ten seconds, and that guy just had that look, and he was killer in it. It affected you, and he overshadowed the lead actor. He said nothing, but he still overshadowed him. It’s that impact you can have. People think, “I’m on set, I need to talk, talk, talk.” Do the complete opposite. For me in particular, that’s how I feel.
Brian Rose: Clint Eastwood used to have a line: “Don’t just do something, stand there,” as opposed to, “Don’t just stand there, do something.” That’s how he did the spaghetti westerns. You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be the character. In so many of his moments, he’s just there.
RJ Mitte: I mean, how much talking do we actually do in life? If you want real life, you bring real life. Do we fill every single moment with conversation? I don’t. I sit in silence quite a bit. I’ll let other people talk for a long time. Other than this! I’ll sit in silence for as long as I can find silence.
48:38 Brian Rose: But life after Breaking Bad for you: you know it’s coming, you have some time to prepare, but it could go one way or the other. You’ve obviously been busy, but what happens?
RJ Mitte: You just keep working. Whatever keeps the lights on, man. It’s a hard thing to do when you come off a show. Everyone gets depressed, because you don’t go back to that family. You don’t go back to that work. You don’t see the people you really enjoyed working with. But life goes on. Are you just going to dwell and sit idle in the past, or are you going to move forward and try to create a new future? And luckily enough, Breaking Bad gave me the opportunity to work.
Brian Rose: The thing is, most people are like, “I’m just going to wait around for that next acting job to come along.”
RJ Mitte: Yeah. You can’t. If you wait around for anything in this world, it will pass you by before you can catch it. A lot of people expect… they’re like, “Oh, you’re acting a lot. You’re going on another show.” And I’m like, “No, I’m auditioning. I’m looking for another project.” It’s not like you can just go and jump on a new show. It doesn’t work like that. This is the real world. This isn’t a television show. It isn’t, “I’m just going to jump on some NBC show or a bunch of movies.” No, you work to get on those movies. And it’s a lot easier to get another job when you have a job than when you have no job and you’re trying to get work.
But from Breaking Bad, I was able to turn to a lot of non-profit work in particular. I’m fairly heavily involved in the philanthropic world. I sit on two boards. One is out of Los Angeles, with SAG-AFTRA, on the diversity division. I sit on another board, as a lifetime board member, out of Austin, Texas, where we work on elder care, education and disability services. I work with the United States government. I’ve been working with the United Kingdom government, through Scope and Channel 4. I’ve just recently come into contact with some people in the Australian government who I would like to partner and work with. I work with Shriners Hospitals for Children, which is one of the facilities I went to as a child, from 3 to 13.
Brian Rose: Are you the most famous disabled actor?
RJ Mitte: No, I don’t think so. You have Geri Jewell, you have Danny Woodburn. You have a lot of major disabled actors. I think I’m in a sense the most trending one, when you get down to the youth dynamic of what I have and what I’ve done. But I wouldn’t classify myself as that.
51:55 Brian Rose: Do you like that term, disabled? Because the way you described it just about 20 minutes ago, it’s enabled. That whole thing enables you.
RJ Mitte: Yeah. Well, I grew up being called disabled. I grew up with handicapped and disabled, and I grew up in that mindset, and that really affects your vocabulary. You have a lot of people who say, “I’m able-bodied.” There are so many ways people want to describe disability, but I grew up with it being called disability, so for me that’s the most natural way to say it. That’s the way I’ve processed it. Do I look at it as a disability? No. But it’s just the way I’ve learned to speak and where my mindset is. And it goes back to affecting a mindset: changing the wording, changing how people talk, changing how people use certain sentences and phrases. That all depends on how you grew up with disability.
I like to look at these more as a challenge than a disability. I think everyone has them; everyone faces them. And people like to dwell. They’re like, “Oh, I’m sick. Cure me.” When people look at a disability in particular, they’re like, “Oh, it’s an illness. It’s something we have to cure and fix and overcome.” And yes, it is something you have to overcome. But fix and cure? We’re human. We have follies. We will break bones. We will have injuries. You can’t fix that. That’s not something to fix. That’s something to learn from, and it’s a challenge to learn with.
People are always like, “Don’t you wish sometimes you didn’t have CP?” I’m like, “My CP gave me a job.” I don’t think about that. I think about making the best of it. I think about bettering myself. I think about taking control of my body. Most people don’t even think about that, and they’re not in control of their own bodies. People have a tendency to be irrational. People have a tendency to succumb to pressures and ideas and different things. They don’t actually control their lives; they’re being controlled by this manipulation. That goes from fear, to people placing their fear upon you, to people who have a tendency to infringe on others. That’s not OK, and people need to see it for what it is.
54:45 Brian Rose: Talk to me about modelling. I didn’t see that one coming, but it’s very cool, and it gives you a different media imprint with other people. The runway stuff, the Gap stuff. How has that changed how people relate to you?
RJ Mitte: Well, people definitely know I can walk now. That’s definitely a plus.
Brian Rose: And you’re walking the catwalks. And yet when you were younger, you had casts on your legs when you were three years old.
RJ Mitte: Casts and braces. And the thing is, I walked fine, but it was something people saw first, and they didn’t see me. I never really allowed my braces or my casts to hinder what I did. I played soccer with them. I rode dirt bikes with them. I rode go-karts with them. Not always well, but I still did it.
Going back to what you do after a show like Breaking Bad: you work. You do whatever you can. I love going and not being idle. Through my work, I’m able to travel. I’m in England right now; if I just sat idle, I wouldn’t be here. I’ve been able to travel the world and work with amazing artists and people like Vivienne Westwood and Sopopular and Julian Zigerli, all these amazing people who create clothes and things, but they’re still creating. It’s an art form. Not everyone looks at creating clothes as an art form, but it is, and I have fun doing it. Will I get rich from walking a runway? No. You get like a hundred bucks, and that’s fine. I’m not doing it for that. I’m doing it because it keeps me going and it brings new work. When I’m doing these runway shows, I have meetings all day, and it’s not just about modelling. It’s about acting. It’s about producing. It’s about what’s the next thing. I do a number of these things and I keep interchanging them as I see fit, because in this industry, I go back to it, we’re all under the same umbrella. It’s pouring with rain everywhere, but we’re all huddling together because we’ve got the one umbrella.
57:07 Brian Rose: It must put you in a different creative space, and you’re in touch with different people, because there’s the fashion and then there’s the Hollywood acting. I know you do DJing too. It must also help you come up with ideas and be creative yourself when you’re around these different people, because a Vivienne Westwood is completely different from, say, a Vince Gilligan or a Bryan Cranston.
RJ Mitte: Oh, completely. You get to see a different mindset in each of these people, and not just a different mindset but a different way of processing. Look at how they process acting. You have the sets, you have your writers, you get your producers, you get your headliners, you go in, you pull the actors together, you film it, then you go into post, you edit it, you put it together, and then you try to sell it. With fashion, you build your collection. You try to get your collection published and funded through other companies. Next thing you know, you do a runway, you start casting models, you do the show, and then collectors and other people see it and try to get your fashion from there.
The philanthropic world is a little different. You go in, you work with these organisations, you talk to kids, you talk to people, and you figure out what you are needed for, whether that’s being a figurehead or being hands-on, working with children in the medical field. From that process you find steps along the way, and not every step and not every way is going to be the same. Some steps are higher than others. Some steps are lower than others. But the trick is, if you keep climbing and keep driving forward and you are actually working towards something, you can’t go wrong. And having that passion goes back into it: a passion to keep driving forward, to keep wanting to learn more.
People go to school to learn, yes. But you’re not going to learn everything from school. Books can give you some knowledge, but not necessarily real-world knowledge. It’s not like you take algebra to do your taxes. It’s not like you’re doing world history every day of your life. You learn from the world. You are making history as we evolve and grow, and we have more access to see it now. But we have a tendency not to look at it as learning. We look at it as, “Oh, that just happened.” But what just happened? How did that just happen? Why did that just happen? People stop asking themselves questions that challenge them, and we need to get back to that mindset.
1:00:02 Brian Rose: What’s fascinating to me about you is that you’re just going to stay busy and keep taking on all these new projects. I think people forget, with actors and even musicians, that they remember them for the big hits, but they forget the 90 per cent of the stuff on IMDb that never became a hit, whether it’s the Beatles or Spielberg. Like you said, a young actor can just be thinking, “OK, I’m going to wait for the next big series on HBO to call,” but you have to go and make that happen, and you probably have to do a bunch of things until it happens with the next movie.
RJ Mitte: And with a lot of those actors, the issue is they go home. They go back to wherever they’re from, back to living with their mom or dad, or wherever they can, and they take what little money they made and they just wait. For me, that doesn’t work. For me there’s no going back to what was there. There’s only going forward. It’s sad when you see people with potential who just become stagnant. That big job may never come unless you build it.
Brian Rose: Right.
RJ Mitte: And now we’re in a world of building our own projects, creating our own things, driving our own industry, and now more than ever we have the ability to do it. Yes, it’s not always going to be good, and it’s not always on a grand scale, but we have the ability.
Brian Rose: Right. And that deal might happen backstage at a Milan runway, or in a board meeting in the UK, or wherever else you’re flying around to, Australia. You never know when the next thing’s going to happen.
RJ Mitte: No, you don’t.
Brian Rose: That’s good advice for anyone, not just actors.
RJ Mitte: Oh, it carries over to everything in life. This isn’t just about acting or this type of industry. Like I said earlier, if you don’t have a passion for what you’re doing, get out of it. Stay away from it, because it’s only going to get worse, and it’s only going to get harder to get out of.
Brian Rose: True. You’re just digging a hole.
RJ Mitte: You’re just digging a hole, and the deeper it gets, sometimes it’s a hole you cannot crawl out of. And you won’t. Next thing you know, five, ten years go by, you have a wife, you’re having your first child, and you still hate your job. Do you think it’s going to get any easier to get out of that job? No. You’ve got to pay to keep your family and give them a life. If you’re not making money doing what you love, you’re not going to be happy, and you’re going to have to keep making money, so you’re just going to be even more miserable as time goes by. If you’re not doing what you love, there really isn’t a point.
Brian Rose: Can I finish off by asking about some of the things you do in your personal life, like a daily routine? I know you’re travelling all around the world now, jet-lagged in different time zones, but is there something you do to get centred in the morning, something where you’re like, “I always need to do this”? It could even be when you’re preparing for acting. Is there a certain routine you do?
1:03:03 [London Real promo removed]
1:03:27 RJ, I always ask everyone a question at the end, and I’m going to ask you now. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old RJ… actually, I might even go back to 15 for you.
RJ Mitte: Let’s go 15. Go back to 14.
Brian Rose: Fourteen. If you had to call that 14-year-old RJ and give him a bit of advice, what would you tell him?
RJ Mitte: Run. Run. Don’t accept the job. Go back home. No.
Brian Rose: What would you be doing? I’ve got a funny feeling you would still be grinding at whatever you were doing and trying to be the best.
RJ Mitte: I would be grinding. It would just be a different grind. It would be a lot easier existence than what I have now. I think the biggest thing is I would probably just say: stay on the path. I have a tendency to fight things that are happening to me. I have a tendency to go, “What’s this? Let’s hold on. Let’s slow down a little bit. Let’s freeze-frame this moment before we jump to the next one.” I like to process it. I like to see it unfold. I look not just at one outcome but at all the outcomes of where that one moment can take me. And in my life, one moment can affect everything. I just had a moment recently that will affect my path for everything else. It’s a path where I can either elevate myself, lower myself, or plateau and stay along the same line.
I think the biggest thing I would probably tell myself is not to fight it as much as I do sometimes. What’s funny is, when I start fighting it, I get slapped in the face, man. I get hit hard by the universe, God, whatever. It’s like, “Oh, you want to learn a lesson? All right, let’s learn a lesson.” And I usually learn the lesson. Sometimes it’s harder to learn the lesson than to just accept what’s happening. But when I learn, I learn, and I don’t go back to it. I only evolve from there. But it definitely slaps me in the face, man. It definitely hits me hard.
Brian Rose: Yeah. You can be your own worst enemy sometimes. I used to call it, in my life, trying to put a square peg into a round hole. I kept trying to push it in there, and now, with time, I realise what I was trying to do. You’re trying to swim upriver, and as much as you want to…
RJ Mitte: It’s not going to happen.
1:06:09 Brian Rose: Last thing: to all the people watching and listening out there, whether they want to be actors or whether they feel like they can’t do anything because of, say, a disability, what advice do you give them? What’s one thing they can take away?
RJ Mitte: I think the biggest thing is: find your passion. Find what you love. Find what you care about, not what people are telling you, not people imposing their opinions on you. What are you passionate about? What do you love? What do you want out of this world? Because you really only get one of them. You only get one chance, and in this life you really only get that one chance. I feel that people go through life with regrets and without taking those chances, and they let things pass them by. You need to take that risk, and not be controlled by your fear but control your fear.
If you can utilise your fear and turn it into a positive, no matter what it is, it can apply to so many different aspects of your life. If you can utilise your fear and turn it against what you are afraid of, you will advance. You will grow, and you will be able to step out of a realm of comfort that you have become comfortable with for such a long time.
And I think the big thing is that we need to be less afraid. What you wear, how you appear, brushing your hair, brushing your teeth, wearing your clothes, turning left versus right, taking that intersection versus going around the block: at one point or another, somewhere in there, is fear. If you can look past that and just accept what you are, and accept, “This is a good idea, I’m taking this,” and not think, “What if I do this? Where is that going?” No, just do it and hope for the best. That’s really all we have. And just keep evolving.
Never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Can’t is an idea. It’s an infection. There are so many poisonous words in our world, and can’t is one of those poisonous words. When you dwell in a mindset of can’t, you dwell in a mindset of fear. And once you start believing you can’t do something, you won’t be able to do it. Even if you’ve done it before, even if you’ve lived your life doing it, as soon as you believe you can’t do it, you will stop doing it, because in your mind you can’t. But if you live without that mindset, and say, “I can, and I choose to do this,” because we choose what we want to do, be it physical, mental, whatever it is, you can overcome it. You’re not always going to fully overcome some of these things. Some of these things are just not feasible to overcome. But if you fight for what you want and you try, you will always have a better life than the one you had in the beginning.
1:09:28 Brian Rose: So RJ, you are a man who is wise beyond his years. One of the reasons I really wanted to have you here was this perspective you have, that you can take a so-called disability and turn it… I always tell people, take a liability and turn it into an asset.
RJ Mitte: Yeah.
Brian Rose: And it’s put you on this amazing path where you can climb higher and climb steeper, as opposed to the so-called easy way.
RJ Mitte: Yeah.
Brian Rose: And the other thing I like about you is this always-grinding attitude. You’re doing this and doing that, all these different things, because we just assume that actors have this life or that life, bouncing, like you said, from this show to that show.
RJ Mitte: Well, the sad thing about this industry is that it’s all fabricated. No one really realises it. The magazines, what you see on television: it’s a show. It’s nothing more and nothing less than a fabrication. People have this tendency of looking up to movie stars, and sadly enough, the days of movie stars are gone. We had them for a little bit, and they slowly fizzled out over time. In the early 2000s we still had that. But movie stars now aren’t real. They’re not valued. Back in the day, movie stars were politicians. They fought for people. They changed things. They drove organisations. Now they just want to be famous and wear big watches and drive fancy cars. But what they don’t tell you is that they have to give back those big watches and fancy cars after they say cut.
The only reason you see what you see is because they want to show you that idea, and it doesn’t necessarily exist. It’s sad to see the manipulation, and everyone really is being manipulated. But we have to work. We have to grow. And for me in particular, when I see people lying about that, putting on a facade, it bugs me more often than not. The issue is they get stuck in the facade. Once you start believing your own facade, that’s where the spiral starts. That’s where people disappear.
Brian Rose: I don’t think you’re in danger of that.
RJ Mitte: I try not to be.
Brian Rose: No, you seem extremely grounded. I’m really excited to watch you over the next few years and find out what happens.
RJ Mitte: Me too.
Brian Rose: We always have people in here who have been on great journeys or have great things coming, so I really appreciate you sitting down and talking to us.
RJ Mitte: The pleasure is all mine.
Brian Rose: Our tagline on London Real is “It’s about the journey”, and I do believe it is, as opposed to the outcome. I think people can learn so much from what you said about that perspective.
RJ Mitte: Well, the thing about having an outcome is that as soon as you have that outcome, the next journey starts, because you have to keep pushing forward. A lot of people are like, “Oh, you had Breaking Bad. You have it made. It’s done.” No, that just means I have to do something better, which is extremely difficult, but I have no choice now. And if I did it once, I can do it again. That isn’t just me; in life in general, you can always improve. You can always grow. I don’t think I was that good on Breaking Bad when I look at it. I know I can do better. People think, “Oh, I did my best.” You didn’t do your best. You can always be better. You can always be faster. It just takes time, evolving and learning a new way of looking at life.
Brian Rose: Again, some people would say that having that early success on Breaking Bad would make the rest of your career difficult, but you’re turning it into something that enables you to set the bar even higher.
RJ Mitte: Oh, that’s really what I need to do. That’s a necessity. I could not be finished with that. That’s not my end mark.
Brian Rose: So RJ, it’s exciting. I’m going to keep watching what you’re doing on the runway, on the decks and in film. All the best. Come and see us in another year or so.
RJ Mitte: Let you go, man? I’ll see you in a couple of years. I’ve got a little bit more time.
Brian Rose: OK, cool. A couple of years. Thanks so much, man. I appreciate it.
RJ Mitte: Definitely.
1:14:18 [London Real promo removed]
