{"id":910455,"date":"2026-09-30T01:44:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T01:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/910455\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T01:44:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T01:44:18","slug":"breaking-bad-reunion-tour-bryan-cranston-and-aaron-paul-announce-australian-and-new-zealand-dates-for-2027","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/910455\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking Bad reunion tour: Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul announce Australian and New Zealand dates for 2027"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Michael<\/p>\n

September 30, 2026 \u2014 8:00am<\/p>\n

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For 62 one-hour episodes between 2008 and 2013, the critically exalted American neo-Western crime drama Breaking Bad was the apotheosis of golden age TV. But the show\u2019s stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul are clear on one thing: there is no holiday special coming to brighten the show\u2019s dark finish.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf [creator] Vince Gilligan [came to us] and said, I\u2019ve got an idea, \u2018A Very Breaking Bad Christmas\u2019, I would say, \u2018you need to lie down. I\u2019m not doing it, and I need to take care of you because something\u2019s wrong\u2019. Can you imagine?\u201d Cranston says, laughing.<\/p>\n

\"Brother,Brother, can you spare a dime? Breaking Bad stars Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston on the road.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd it\u2019s important for human beings not to be so sentimental about leaving something so that it allows space to move into something else,\u201d Cranston adds. \u201cThat\u2019s our lives. It\u2019s cyclical. We have to end something in order for something new to begin, but yet the sentiment tends to have people go, \u2018but wouldn\u2019t you love to go back?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt ended so beautifully, you don\u2019t want to mess with that,\u201d Paul says. \u201cIt\u2019s perfect, the way it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, 13 years later, we may have closed the chapter on the series, about a high school chemistry teacher who, after being diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer, turns his home into a methamphetamine lab, in cahoots with one of his former students, in order to secure his family\u2019s financial security, but we cannot seem to quite close the book.<\/p>\n

Cranston and Paul are heading to Australia for \u201can unscripted evening with two men, five years of behind-the-scenes stories, and a lifelong friendship\u201d. Think of it as a slide night crossed with a TED Talk. Punctuated by reflections on a TV shows which still regularly tops \u201cbest of all time\u201d audience polls.<\/p>\n

\"BreakingBreaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul will tour Australia and New Zealand in January 2027. <\/p>\n

The format of that kind of touring show, while not unfamiliar to an Australian audience who have grown accustomed to the TED Talk-style touring show \u2013 similar tours have been undertaken by artists as varied as John Cleese and Eric Idle, Brian Blessed, Carrie Fisher and The Goodies \u2013 it is a relatively new genre for a pair of American TV actors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to bring a very entertaining evening,\u201d says Cranston. \u201cWe have a lot of stories personally and together, and we have some ideas … to present some really fun moments, showing some clips and doing a couple of crazy things. We want the audience to leave every night after a show and go, oh man, that was fantastic. That\u2019s our job.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the original Breaking Bad series is not strictly seen as a franchise, at least in Law & Order terms or scale, it did spawn shot-for-shot Spanish language remake Met\u00e1stasis, the six-season prequel\/sequel Better Call Saul (2015\u20132022), a feature-length epilogue El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) written and directed by Vince Gilligan and starring Paul, and the somewhat curious six-part animated short-form series Slippin\u2019 Jimmy (2022), about young Jimmy McGill.<\/p>\n

\"BryanBryan Cranston (as Walter White) and Aaron Paul (as Jesse Pinkman) in Breaking Bad.AMC<\/p>\n

The biggest takeaway for Cranston and Paul, however, has been an enduring friendship which formed in the infancy of the series. \u201cWhen you\u2019re doing a project, it feels like you\u2019re going away on a sleep away summer camp,\u201d Paul says. \u201cYou hope for the best. You hope that you connect with some of these kids.<\/p>\n

\u201cAm I going to make friends? Or am I going to be the person that\u2019s in the corner not talking to anybody? And sometimes you\u2019re like, I\u2019m going to be friends with these people forever, but then you go back to your day-to-day lives and life takes a hold of you,\u201d Paul adds.<\/p>\n

Cranston was \u201cthe greatest leader on a set you could ever wish for,\u201d Paul says. \u201cHe\u2019s the hardest worker, but he loves to have a good time while doing so. We quickly realised we have the same work ethic. We come ready, we come prepared, we\u2019re ready to do the work. We\u2019re not going to mess this up. We\u2019re going to give it our all.\u201d<\/p>\n

That off-screen chemistry has also been parlayed into an independent artisanal mezcal brand, Dos Hombres. Stars with an alcohol product is something of a crowded genre. George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey both have tequilas, Ryan Reynolds has a gin. Brad Pitt, and Kylie Minogue, for that matter, both have ros\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

Is bottle-in-your-back-pocket politics completive in LA, I ask them both. Paul answers, diplomatically. \u201cI don\u2019t feel that,\u201d he says. \u201cWe just know how we do the work. This was all self-funded. This was our brainchild. It wasn\u2019t an operation that came to us asking us if we wanted to make a quick buck. We just focus on the dedication to the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AaronAaron Paul and Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.AMC \/ Sony Pictures<\/p>\n

And while the original series itself was fairly wild, even by cable TV standards, and it came in for some criticism for turning drug manufacturers into storybook heroes \u2013 \u201cI always saw the show as … poor choices made by human beings at any given part of their lives,\u201d Cranston says \u2013 it also made some surprising observations on the world, at least in American terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt illuminated the deficiency in the healthcare system that we have in the United States,\u201d Cranston says. \u201cThe fact that teachers are not paid what they should be paid and my character needing a second job, it\u2019s shameful really, in that sense on those two issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

The immortality of the show too, while not wholly surprising \u2013 its significance was clear as it started to pop in the cultural zeitgeist during its second season \u2013 has been something of a longer-arc surprise to the two actors. In Australia, in a similar fashion to another critical TV masterpiece The Wire, its early popularity was bolstered by sales of DVD boxed sets, when digital hard media fuelled a collector boom.<\/p>\n

Editor’s pick\"This<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt just keeps surprising us,\u201d Paul says. \u201cWe always knew it was special; the moment we landed on Netflix it just exploded globally. Brian won best actor Emmy from doing seven episodes of the first season. The critics really praised us from day one, and then Netflix kind of changed the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cranston likens it to becoming a parent for the first time. \u201cYou don\u2019t really know what it\u2019s going to be like,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we were making the show, we just knew that it was really well written and if we didn\u2019t screw it up, that we might have a chance to make a good show. Then it became something bigger than any of us could imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul will tour Australia and New Zealand in January 2027. Tickets go on sale September 30. For more information, see fane.com.au\/cranstonandpaul.<\/a><\/p>\n

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"MichaelMichael Idato<\/a> is the culture editor-at-large of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"September 30, 2026 \u2014 8:00am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":910456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-910455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=910455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/910456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=910455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=910455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=910455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}