One of last year's best new series, Breaking Bad , is about to debut its second season on AMC this weekend. If you haven't seen the show, you're missing out on something special, as the series follows the story of Walt White ( Bryan Cranston ), an overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When Walt finds out he has terminal lung cancer, he makes a dramatic decision, teaming with former student Jesse (Aaron Paul) in order to use his scientific skills to make and distribute meth.

Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down with Cranston and Breaking Bad 's creator, Vince Gilligan , for a conversation about the series. When Cranston found out I was from IGN, he mentioned the fact that we'd named him Best Actor in our IGN Best of 2008 awards. Cranston, who won a well-deserved Emmy for his role as Walt, jokingly teased me over the fact that we didn't have a physical award to give him, exclaiming, "When do I get the award? This is bulls**t!"During the conversation that followed Cranston and Gilligan discussed what it's like working together on Breaking Bad, Cranston taking the reins as director for the season premiere, and the acclaimed actor's strange connection to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

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He was on my radar before I even thought of the show. He starred in an episode of The X-Files [" Drive "] I wrote about ten years back. Bryan is a chameleon, and I mean that in the best possible sense. This is a guy, who when he came and read for us for that X-Files episode, I was like, "I've never seen that guy before. Where's this guy been hiding? This guy's great!" And then they said, "Well, he was the guy with one arm who gave Tom Hanks his orders in Saving Private Ryan and sent him on a mission. He played Buzz Aldrin in From the Earth to the Moon. He's the dentist on Seinfeld." I was going, "What? That's not the same guy!" He's a chameleon, and that's the best thing you can say about an actor. A lot of them aren't. A lot of actors just play themselves over and over again, which can be fine if they're interesting to begin with. But that's the mark of a real actor, in my opinion.He was on my radar because I wanted to work with him again ever since that episode. And lo and behold, I got my chance, very briefly after I came up with the idea of this character. I started to think, "Well, who would be the right guy for this?" And very shortly, I thought, "Bryan Cranston. I want to work with this guy again." Because he can be dramatic as hell, he can be funny as hell, and he's got this deep, abiding humanity that just pours out of him, whether he means for it to or not. You've gotta like this guy Walt, because he's making a lot of bad decisions. You've got to get the audience to go with him on this journey on this really ill-advised journey that he's taking. He's cooking crystal meth and people have to buy into it and not necessarily like what he's doing, but understand why he's doing it. You need that humanity and basic likability and Bryan's got the whole package.From the first page![Cranston gets up and goes to his bag, pulling out the script for Breaking Bad's pilot]I brought this in, because I want Vince to write something terribly meaningful on this script.Oh, wow!This is the script that I first read when I came in. When you read the first page... [Reading from script] "The Winnebago zooms past. Inside, you see a driver's knuckles clinging his eyes bug wide. He's wearing underpants." Right? So I'm going, "What the f**k is this?!" And I keep reading, "Behind him are breakers, beakers, flasks. Some kind of chemical spills on the floor, yellow liquid. Two dead bodies." And I'm going, "What the hell is going on?"Yeah, exactly. Same old thing [Laughs] So it provoked me. It challenged you to go to the next page. And you have this [description] on Walter White and who this person is and what's going on and he's full of emotion and that's the end of the teaser. It's like, what's next? What's going to happen? It is that proverbial page turner. I got to the very last page and I closed it and called my agents and said, "Get me in to see Vince Gilligan!"