[#image: /photos/5582f9ef09f0bee56440b9e1]|||undefined|||[#image: /photos/5582f9ef09f0bee56440b9e8]|||||| ** Bryan Cranston on Becoming Walter White and the Final Season of Breaking Bad**

If there was one person this year who gave us a National Cultural Moment—the kind of shared group experience that isn’t supposed to happen anymore, at least not without the word Bowl appended to its title—it was Vince Gilligan. The unfailingly polite Breaking Bad showrunner spun the story of a chemistry-teacher-turned-meth-dealer into operatic drama. GQ caught up with him in the aftermath of The End.

It’s been a week and a half since the Breaking Bad finale. How are you feeling?

It’s quiet for the first time in a few months, and I feel pretty good. I feel…just kind of tired. Like I got the flu or really long-lasting jet lag or something. After the Emmys and the press surrounding the final episode, all the adrenaline kind of leaked out of me, and I’ve been watching a lot of old TV, you know? Watching a lot of, like, Columbo and just lying around. I feel kind of—and this is an odd thing for me to say, if you know me well—I feel at peace about the whole thing. It’s kind of a rare feeling for me. It’s good.

I think everybody knew the ending would be a big deal, but it really turned into as big and feverish a phenomenon as I can remember. What happened?

Have you ever been sitting at your desk and you crumple up a piece of paper and, without even looking, you just toss it over your shoulder and it goes straight into the wastebasket? You didn’t think about it. You didn’t stress about it. You just did it. And now that you’re thinking about it, you could never do it again in a million years, no matter how hard you tried. That’s what this was like. We worked our butts off, but everybody works their butts off in TV. We tried to make the best show it was humanly possible to make, but you know, the guys on According to Jim did the same thing. As to why this thing hit…I could make up some stream of nonsense, but honestly…I wish I could explain it, because then I might have a fighting chance on TV in the future. The truth is, I just have to be satisfied that it happened at all.

Are you tired of explaining and defending the final episode?

** **I really haven’t. My time-honored philosophy of not going on the Internet has held me in good stead. I recommend it to everybody. At this point, I’ve become rather phobic about it.

Your writers haven’t been so shy. They’re all over Twitter and elsewhere—talking about the show, posting pictures, talking about their body parts....

** **I didn’t really know that. Tom Schnauz did send me a couple of examples of his Twitter feed by email. I was like, ’Man, you’re never going to be president now."

They’ve also, to a kind of unheard of degree, been out there discussing and interpreting the show. Is that cool with you?

** **Again, I didn’t know most of that was going on. Except for Tom talking about his taint. But it sounds fine to me. I mean, they worked on the show as hard as I did. They have every right to talk about it. It’s theirs as much as it is mine.