By Jonathan Dekel, Postmedia News

Perhaps the most shocking thing Breaking Bad’s final mid-season finale — in which DEA agent Hank Schrader finally realized Walter White, his seemingly mild mannered brother-in-law, was in fact the formidable methamphetamine cook known as Heisenberg — is that it almost didn’t happen.

According to actor Dean Norris, who plays the wise-cracking Schrader on the AMC series, when the writers set off to write Breaking Bad’s final season, he specifically requested his character be killed off in the first half.

“I called [series creator] Vince [Gilligan] and I said, ‘Hey man, maybe Hank should die in the first eight. Wouldn’t that be a great ending?’” Norris recalled during an interview at Breaking Bad’s Albuquerque set this week.

As Norris explained, when AMC announced they were going to renew Breaking Bad for fifth and final season, the forward-thinking actor landed a leading role in a comedy pilot, but was forced to pull out when Season 5’s 16 episode order was split into a pair of eight-episode runs to air over two years.

“When they [AMC] originally picked up the 16 [episodes] I thought, ‘Great, I can do a pilot, do the 16 and then be free to do a show.’ ” Norris said. “And then at some point f–king whoever decided they were going to split it into two eights so it cut me off from doing a pilot — and I had a pilot I wanted to do.”

Norris figured the only way he could still manage to appear in the pilot and not violate his Breaking Bad contract would be if Gilligan killed of his character before the Season 5 hiatus, which led to the seemingly irrational request.

“He said no in his nice Southern way: ‘I need you, what else am I going to write about in the last eight?’ ” Norris recalled, impersonating Richmond, Va., native Gillian’s accent. “So I said, ‘Oh, f–king right,’ and really I couldn’t force him to do it because I have a contract I’d have to get out of but I asked him very seriously to kill me.”

Asked if, in retrospect, Norris regrets his request, especially considering the series’ upcoming final episodes will be, in his words, the most “Hank-centric“ yet, the 51-year-old Harvard grad explained that he was only being rational.

“It was either do eight episodes or do 24 and I’ve got five kids, man.”