Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris on Trump, NFL protests – and why Hank had to die

It’s four years since the tough-guy New Mexico cop took a bullet in the desert sun. But had he lived, what would Walter White’s brother-in-law have made of 2017?

America is a divided country and yet, with a belly laugh and a firm handshake, two different sides of it have just stepped into the room and sat down.

Dean Norris is best known for portraying New Mexico cop Hank Schrader in what is still regularly described as the greatest TV series ever made, Breaking Bad. Hank is an unforgiving man, with a history of casual racism and a mission to win the war on drugs. But in contrast to his most famous character, Norris is a Harvard-educated and Rada-trained actor, and a committed Democrat who’s ridden across Europe on a motorbike.

It’s four years since Hank took a bullet under the desert sun, marking the dramatic summit of Vince Gilligan’s epic drama about Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher turned crystal meth dealer. It’s almost nine months since the cold January morning after the inauguration of President Trump, when Norris pulled on a beanie hat and joined half a million others on the women’s march in DC.

Whether Hank really had to die remains the eternal, moral question for Breaking Bad devotees, of which there are millions. In hindsight, it is certainly a pity that a Hank spin-off can’t happen. In 2017, Hank Schrader would occupy the centre of so many of the questions dominating American life. A drug enforcement agent guarding the border, right where Trump wants to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. He is also a white cop, albeit with many Hispanic friends and colleagues, watching a President go to war with the NFL, with the question of police brutality at its core.

It is an enticing question, and Norris should know better than anyone. Would Hank have voted for Trump?

There is a lengthy pause.

“Boy, that’s an interesting question.

“You know, he has a lot of support in the law-enforcement community, so maybe he would have. I don’t know if he would support him now, but I don’t know. It’s a good question.”

I point out that New Mexico, which tends to back the winner, voted Hillary, but it was largely the Hispanics that did it.

“I think a lot of people in America are a bit conflicted. It could be that Hank would have talked about voting for him, but in the privacy of the ballot box, maybe didn’t.

“Hank was a bravado kind of guy. I always wanted to come to terms with that from a character point of view. I hang out with a lot of law-enforcement people, to see what they’re like because I play them a lot. It’s a tough business, and you’ve got to be a tough guy. Now maybe, somewhere deep inside there might be something softer, but you never let that show.”

Norris’s years wearing the mask of Hank are hardly his only peek behind the curtain into America’s other world. He grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in the industrial Midwest, an ordinary place to which he regularly returns, not least to go to college football games at the University of Notre Dame.

Norris, who studied politics and economics at Harvard, appears to have a clearer understanding than most about quite how America came to be in this place. And, unusually, he has a clearer answer than most as to its route out.

“Well, I come from an interesting background… I saw more clearly than most people [in the Eighties] the Reagan Democrats become the Reagan Democrats. He was the first Trump, from my perspective. People that voted Democrat all their lives, and then all of a sudden came the idea that Democrats were kind of pussies, and Reagan became like, a man. The working class, which for economic reasons alone should be the constituents of the Democratic Party, became the constituents of the Republican Party. And we literally now have a man who lives in a golden tower speaking for blue-collar workers. So somehow, the Democratic Party has a problem with their message, because how could they let that happen?

“I was at the Democratic National Convention, and for four days I didn’t see one electrician, one construction worker, one plumber, one cop on that stage. Ever. So, somehow, somebody needs to be able to get back to that constituency. I would have dropped a big hard hat on that stage, like ‘Stonehenge’ in Spinal Tap, and said, ‘We want you guys on our side. We speak for you. We’re the ones who are going to help you out economically.’

“Forget the cultural stuff. Let’s get to brass tacks. All the cultural stuff can do whatever, what’s going to happen is tax cuts for the rich. How do you get to those people, the Reagan Democrats, who to my money are the same as the Trump Democrats? It’s easy to call it racism or misogyny, but there’s always been a bit of that, at some core we have to find a way to get those people to believe the Democratic Party represents them.”

Later on, I ask about how this divide in America ever comes to resolve itself. Norris says he “does not know, it’s scary”. But he believes that choosing the right candidate in the next election will be key to defeating Trump.

“I don’t know who told the Democrats that charisma isn’t important. I think if you’d had Joe Biden in there it would have been a landslide win. People need to be led, people need to be excited, charged up. They don’t need to read papers on the theory of how things work. A leader needs to have charisma.”

Long years ploughing a particular furrow in the acting business have led Norris to occasionally call himself the “alphabet actor” in that he tends to land parts that involve the letters CIA, FBI, DEA or LAPD.

To a British audience, this down-to-earth guy represents a totemic figure of American life. The nice-guy-but-tough-guy cop, the man who knows the difference between right and wrong but perhaps not a whole lot more.

And suddenly, for those who encounter the American cop chiefly through television rather than real life, it is this figure that stands in the white hot centre of the Black Lives Matter movement, and by turns a frightening war between the President and the NFL. So what happens when the man in the street starts to wonder whether, in fact, the cop is the bad guy?

Again, there is a pause.

“You cannot ignore the legitimate complaints of the Black Lives Matter movement, but again, if I had to give some sort of police perspective on it, and I am clearly not a policeman, I’ll tell you as an actor, trying to become a cop, what you think about is, every single day, you go to work thinking you might have to use your gun.

“And that has got to affect you somehow psychologically. Every single day you go to work thinking, I might not come back. And it is really easy to underestimate the fear of one’s life you have if something goes bad. To at least acknowledge that perspective is something that is important.”

And what about Hank? Would he be booing the NFL players taking a knee?

“I think he would echo the veterans out there who say, ‘Look, we fought for the right of people to make these types of protest.’ I think he might be persuaded by that argument.”

Norris is in London filming a new movie, a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, in which he is an unwitting man turned over by characters played by Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. It meant that it was early last Monday morning, when he received “horrifying” text messages from his sister, who was “barricaded into a supply room” at the Las Vegas country music concert at which 58 people had been murdered and more than 500 injured in the worst mass shooting in American history.

He says the sheer number of people present, 22,000, could be a “tipping point” towards gun control, owing to the “hundreds of thousands” of people who will have received “those same horrifying texts”.

“My wife also had a friend that was there, a good friend,” he says. “And we both kind of commented to each other on the fact that now there is this new normal, where we know people that were involved in a mass shooting. [In fact] we know two people – they weren’t there with each other.”

Norris himself owns guns and “doesn’t have a problem with it” but says the issue needs looking at. “People feel it’s their right to protect themselves with a gun, and I don’t see that’s a problem. It’s limiting the mass casualty element of that, and hoping that it works.”

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is another foray for Norris into the world of comedy, after the success in America this summer of Claws, in which he plays a bisexual Catholic mob boss, laundering his money through a Florida nail salon.

Norris is circumspect about whether this new advance into comedy means the “alphabet actor” is dead. One thing is certain though, Hank Schrader is.

Some time ago, at a urinal in Los Angeles, the former editor of The Independent asked Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston why Hank had to die. He told him, “He was a cancer. He couldn’t contain what I did.”

Norris laughs at this answer, but his own is very different.

“We all have to die, but I think it was the last straw. They tried to hold out for a long time and I think [Hank’s death] was the last, final, break for Walter.

“It was the one time Walter White really cared. He cried didn’t he. He watched Aaron Paul’s girlfriend Jane die, he did a lot of nasty things, but the one time he really hurt inside, was watching Hank die, even though I was the guy going after him. They were trying to offer some new level to Walter White.

“I think they wanted you to think [Hank might live]. I think they want you think you have some sort of shot at a moral ending, and then the truth of the world hits you.”