‘Better Call Saul’ Cast and Creators Tease ‘F–king Amazing’ Final Season and Other Possible Spinoffs
Written by Ethan Shanfeld
How would “Better Call Saul” co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould describe the series’ hotly anticipated final season?
“Fucking amazing,” Gilligan told Variety on the red carpet at last week’s premiere at the Hollywood Legion Theater, while Gould offered: “Holy fucking shit.”
In a more serious tone, Gilligan added that Season 6 is “the best season yet… There’s a real argument to be made that ‘Better Call Saul’ is better than ‘Breaking Bad.'”
Bob Odenkirk teased the final season as an “evolution hard-earned,” while Patrick Fabian, who plays Howard Hamlin, described it as “excruciatingly painfully exciting.” He continued, “It’s a satisfying season. All the setups that they put up the mountain start careening down the mountain.”
The final season of “Better Call Saul” debuts Monday, April 18 on AMC and AMC+, marking the beginning of the end for some of TV’s most beloved characters. But as we’ve seen with the post-“Breaking Bad” movie “El Camino” and the “Saul” spinoff series itself, there’s always more to explore in the world of Gilligan and Gould.
“I do think there’s more life in Gus. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year. But there’s something that we all are intrigued by and we want to find out about. Even me,” said Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Gustavo Fring.
Throughout “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” viewers have watched Gus operate as a drug kingpin in a restauranteur’s clothing. But according to Esposito, there’s more sides to him we haven’t yet seen.
“In ‘Breaking Bad,’ I wanted Gus to have a family… I wanted people to know that Gus has a family,” Esposito said. “That’s in my mind — you never saw that, you don’t know that. But he really was a wonderful family man… hiding in plain sight. I love that concept. You don’t know who lives next door to you. You don’t know what this guy does.”
While shooting “Breaking Bad,” Esposito revealed that the producers took photos of him with his real family and hid them on the wall — something viewers “never really saw.” Gus makes one brief reference to his kids to Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in Season 3 of “Breaking Bad,” but since they are never seen in the show, fans have questioned whether Gus might be lying about having a family. Regardless, Esposito always imagined the character as a loving father.
“I’d love to see [Gus] being gentle with his children, raising children, having a wife, all those things,” he said. “I think there’s room for all that if we were ever to come back to a world in which we were to discover where he came from.”
Esposito isn’t the only one with lingering questions about his character. Said Jonathan Banks: “I still wanna know who the mother was to [Mike’s] son. Who was she? Where is she? What has happened to her?”
Meanwhile, Fabian dreamed up his own spinoff, too: “Kim and Hamlin run away to the Caribbean and they open up a pro bono lawyer workshop where they sail from island to island. Good vistas… maybe Discovery is looking for this? There may be some suntan oil and some bikinis involved. Sounds like good TV to me.”