Anna Gunn

Anna Gunn has a way of standing still while everyone else is explaining. In Breaking Bad (2008) the men talk in paragraphs; Skyler White asks where the money came from and waits for the answer. Our review called it "a welcome plainness amid so much busy self-justification", and that is the whole method. She gives the ordinary question the weight the series' cleverness keeps trying to take from it. Bryan Cranston's Walter can outtalk anyone. He cannot outwait her.

It took a while for anyone to notice what that was worth. She spent the early 1990s in guest parts on Seinfeld and NYPD Blue, and most of the years from 1997 to 2002 recurring on The Practice. Then David Milch, who had worked with her on NYPD Blue, wrote Martha Bullock in Deadwood (2004) with her in mind. Our review of Deadwood does not mention her, and we think that is fair rather than careless: the series hands its best sentences to men who enjoy the sound of them, and Martha is written to be talked past. Gunn does not push for more room than the part has. That is a discipline, and it is also why our review did not stop for her.

Breaking Bad is where the stillness becomes the point. Skyler is the one character who reacts to Walter's lies the way a person would, first with suspicion and then with fear, and the series sets her reactions against his excuses week after week. We will admit that somewhere in the middle of the run we had begun to dread her scenes, and then caught ourselves, because the dread was Gunn's doing: she had made the plain question unbearable to hear in a house where everyone else was having such a good time lying. A great many viewers did not catch themselves and went after the character instead, loudly enough that Gunn wrote about it, calling Skyler "a kind of Rorschach test for society". We would put it more plainly. She was playing the only person on screen who was not enjoying herself, and she made us believe it.

Since then she has been given the front of the frame more often: Gracepoint (2014), Equity (2016), in which she leads a Wall Street thriller as Naomi Bishop, and Clint Eastwood's Sully (2016) opposite Tom Hanks. We have not reviewed them and will not pass judgement from a distance. She went back to Martha Bullock for the feature-length conclusion to Deadwood in 2019. What we can say is that television has served her better than film, because television gives a woman five years to be right about something and a film gives her ninety minutes to be interesting. Start with Breaking Bad. When Walter and Skyler are in the same room, watch her.