How did The Walter White Cameo Come About in 'El Camino'

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie was always supposed to create excitement and instant anticipation amongst everyone and so it did. However, the bigger question about the movie was always going to be if the main man, Bryan Cranston aka Walter White will be seen in any manner whatsoever in the film. Well, this shouldn't quite be a spoiler alert for you because, of course, he did.

Not necessarily adding anything to the plot of the film, Walter White's appearance was just a nostalgic trip right away to the bond that White and Jesse Pinkman shared. However, there are some secrets that needed to be shared and here's how Cranston's cameo came about.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the makers of El Camino had just 36 hours with Bryan Cranston. Thirty-six hours in which to transport, make up and film Breaking Bad’s unforgettable antihero, Walter White, for his appearance in their then-secret movie.

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan had written El Camino, a movie follow-up to his groundbreaking AMC show, clandestinely, and he intended to shoot the film under cover as well, relying on the discretion of his cast and crew at work in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

"We didn't want it ruined for the fans," says Gilligan, who also directed the film, which opened in theaters and premiered on Netflix Oct. 11. "Constitutionally, I don't want the things I look forward to spoiled. If there's a movie I'm looking forward to, I don't want to know jack squat about it before I'm sitting down in the theaters and the lights go down."

Among the headaches for Gilligan’s producers, Melissa Bernstein and Diane Mercer, engaged in this stealth mission was executing a key flashback scene with Walter White and Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman in a diner. At the time, Cranston was appearing in eight performances a week of Network on Broadway, with Mondays off. Their plan was to fly Cranston out Sunday night after his show, shoot all day Monday and in the morning on Tuesday and wrap in time to get Cranston back to New York for his Tuesday night performance.

First came the task of getting Cranston into town incognito. Breaking Bad and the city of Albuquerque are so indelibly intertwined that producers figured if Cranston so much as stepped foot in the Albuquerque airport, the jig would be up — everyone would know why Walter White had come home. They were also worried about the uncertainty of commercial air travel, which could derail their precisely timed shooting schedule for the scene. So the El Camino producers snuck Cranston out of New York with the help of a loaned private jet.

Because of Cranston’s limited time, they couldn’t take him to a remote spot, but had to shoot at a location in the middle of a busy intersection right in town. While filming at the diner, they blocked the set from view using screens and vehicles. One especially distinctive vehicle was parked outside: the beaten up Fleetwood Bounder that served as Walter and Jesse’s mobile meth lab. When passersby saw the distinctive RV outside the diner, there was a plausible explanation Gilligan and his crew hoped they’d believe: a local business had a replica vehicle that they used to give Breaking Bad-themed tours.