{"id":128685,"date":"2025-11-11T00:11:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/128685\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T00:11:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T00:11:06","slug":"aaron-paul-reveals-why-he-promised-not-to-use-his-phone-around-his-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/128685\/","title":{"rendered":"Aaron Paul reveals why he promised not to use his phone around his daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aaron Paul<\/a> is breaking a bad habit.\n<\/p>\n

The Emmy winner recently opened up about a simple conversation with his daughter, Story Annabelle, that led to a profound transformation in his day-to-day life.\n<\/p>\n

“I try not to use my phone in front of my kids. My daughter comes running in and she’s asking me a question, something, and I’m just trying to finish this quick email,” Paul shared on stage<\/a> at the 2025 Wall Street Journal Tech Live conference in Napa Valley, Calif., on Nov. 4.\n<\/p>\n

“Then she stopped asking, and she kind of went and started playing. She’s 7,” Paul said.\n<\/p>\n

The Big Love and Breaking Bad star explained that he apologized for being unresponsive and proposed to “make a pact with you right now. I want to promise that daddy’s not going to be on his phone when he’s with you anymore. She did a one-word response, she went, ‘Really?’ You know, just, ‘Really?’ And it broke my heart. It really did break my heart.”\n<\/p>\n

“I go, ‘I promise you I won’t,’ and she just jumped up and threw her arms around me like she won the biggest prize,’ Paul shared, emotion still redolent in his voice.\n<\/p>\n

Expanding the frame beyond the personal, Paul pronounced, “We owe it to our kids to at least give it a shot. I was having dinner earlier, and it felt like such doom and gloom. They were like, ‘No, you’re going to get left behind! This is the end all be all!’ It’s like, ‘No, it’s not. It’s not’.”\n<\/p>\n

When asked by WSJ columnist Joanna Stern if he meant smartphones in particular or technology as a whole, Paul clarified, “Technology as a whole. You can choose whether the technology controls you. You should control the tech.”<\/p>\n

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our\u00a0EW Dispatch newsletter<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Paul is true to his word. He’s been critical of other technological innovations in the past, including the advent of streaming<\/a>, which has been used by networks to redirect profits<\/a> from repeat viewing away from actors and toward producers and the networks themselves.\n<\/p>\n

In Paul’s own words, “I don’t get a piece from Netflix on\u00a0Breaking Bad, if we’re being totally honest, and that’s insane to me.”\n<\/p>\n

Aaron Paul on ‘Better Call Saul’.<\/p>\n

Greg Lewis \/ AMC \/ Courtesy Everett<\/p>\n

“Shows live forever on these streamers, and it goes through waves,” Paul shared during the 2023 SAG-WGA strike. “I just saw the other day that\u00a0Breaking Bad\u00a0was trending on Netflix.\u00a0I think a lot of these streamers, they know that they have been getting away with not paying people a fair wage, and now it’s time to pony up. And that’s just one of the things that we’re fighting for.”\n<\/p>\n

Even back in 2020, Paul possessed a view of technology<\/a> that was ambivalent at best, reflecting on the impact of his time acting in the tech horror series Westworld, “I’ve always felt that way about technology \u2014 it’s kind of a blessing and a curse. It informs us but also I think it’s taking away a lot of the joys of living. I pride myself on not owning a computer. I am rarely around my phone. I have thousands of unread emails. I have my phone down and my head up.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aaron Paul is breaking a bad habit. The Emmy winner recently opened up about a simple conversation with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128686,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-128685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}