95 minutes with... Aaron Paul

The Breaking Bad star returns to his greatest role

- By Brian Raftery

I CAN ONLY SHOW you this ’cause you’ve seen the film,” Aaron Paul says, grinning proudly as he scrolls through hundreds— maybe thousands?—of photos featuring his 19-month-old daughter, Story. He settles on a short video of the two of them taken during a break in the filming of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. The clip finds the actor in full makeup as Jesse Pinkman, the emotionally pulverized, physically lacerated meth-maker. As Paul gently describes to Story the harrowing (and very top-secret) El Camino scene he has just filmed, his daughter gazes at her father’s bruised and grubby face with affection. “She’s totally fine when she sees Jesse’s scars,” Paul says, putting down his phone. “She looks past all of that and right into my eyes.”

It’s less than a month before the release of El Camino, and the 40-year-old Paul is sitting on the back terrace of his Los Feliz home, dressed in a beige linen shirt and matching slacks. A red Radio Flyer wagon—piloted by a lone teddy bear—is parked nearby at the foot of an immense artificial waterfall that cascades down an entire hillside. The nearly 100-year-old estate has been home to several Hollywood dignitaries over the years— including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jim Parsons, and Twilight-era Robert Pattinson—and is anchored by a lush, panoramic garden so large Paul is still sorting through every plant. “When we moved in,” he says, “they gave us two binders of information about running this place.”

Paul and his wife, the anti-bullying nonprofit founder Lauren Parsekian, took over the estate earlier this year, not long after a family trip to New Mexico. That’s where Paul had spent several months covertly reprising the role of Jesse, last seen in