IN the first two seasons of the AMC drama “Breaking Bad,” Jesse Pinkman has been party to acts of larceny, blackmail, murder and other felonies; lost his girlfriend as a result of her drug abuse; and fallen back so hard on his own addiction that he eventually ended up in rehab. As Jesse, a seedy, selfish drug maker and dealer endures these hardships, Aaron Paul, the 30-year-old actor who plays him, could hardly be happier.

“I’m just so thankful that Jesse’s alive and breathing,” he said in a recent telephone interview.

Mr. Paul is not simply glad to be working on “Breaking Bad,” the acclaimed series that returns for its third season on Sunday, or to be sharing a screen with Bryan Cranston, a two-time Emmy Award-winner who plays Walter White, a cancer patient whose desperation draws him further and further into the drug trade.

What he means is, he is grateful that the “Breaking Bad” producers have not yet fulfilled their ambitions of killing off Jesse, a role for which Mr. Paul received an Emmy nomination last season, even though they have toyed with the possibility since its very first episode.

“In my mind’s eye,” said Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad,” “I pictured a big season-ender for Season 1 in which Jesse Pinkman gets horribly murdered in a drug deal gone terribly wrong.” This would be, Mr. Gilligan added, “a very mechanical plot development that would force Walt to be guilty and second-guess his decision to become a drug dealer.”