RJ Mitte, who plays Walter “Flynn” White Jr. on Breaking Bad, came to the campus Thursday to talk to students about his experiences.
AMC’s Breaking Bad may be over, but Walter “Flynn” White Jr.’s guileless, do-gooding ethos lives on through his portrayer, RJ Mitte, who lectured to a mostly full room of students in Stamp’s Grand Ballroom Thursday night.
His talk, which oscillated between acting tips, moralistic advice and stories on fighting through cerebral palsy, lasted close to 30 minutes and was followed by a question-and-answer session of equal length. Tickets were free, and some wandered in after the lecture had already started.
The 21-year-old Mitte won the audience over with his unwavering optimism.
“My whole life people have been telling me, ‘You’ll never do this, you’ll never do that,’ ” Mitte said, in an interview with The Diamondback before the lecture. “I played soccer for six seasons. I work in television and film now. I’m originally from Louisiana. The options I was given were not good opportunities. Everyone can take what they have and turn it into a grander idea of who they are.”
Most of Mitte’s lecture was filled with bombastic declarations and rhetorical questions that he used as a motivational tactic.
“You can change someone’s life with a smile,” he said at one point. “Laughing is infectious,” he said at another. “Who is actually normal?” he asked.
Most students, including freshman chemistry major Gabby Zakrocki, ate it up.
“I didn’t expect him to say that much about his disability,” Zakrocki said. “He gave really good examples for how we could help, and he’s a good role model for us.”
“I don’t usually care about celebrities,” said junior psychology major Nina Shen. “[But] he was such a nice and friendly guy.”
During the Q-and-A session, Mitte was showered with compliments. One girl even got in the question line — which stretched from the podium nearly to the side exit doors — for the sole purpose of giving him a hug.
A few, though, found Mitte’s inspiration shtick to be trite and frustrating.
“I thought it was kind of cliched,” said junior kinesiology major Matt Taylor. “I thought it was interesting but he said a lot of standard cliches, like, ‘You can do anything you want to do.’”
Even though the Breaking Bad finale was less than two months ago, Mitte hardly referenced the series at all. As soon as he walked onstage, he asked whether there were any fans of the show in the crowd, eliciting shrieks of approval. But, aside from audience questions and brief tidbits about his time on set, Mitte steered the conversation away from Breaking Bad.
One student asked whether Mitte was tired of answering Breaking Bad questions, a theory that he debunked. He did, however, seem more interested in evaluating the show’s ties to the real world rather than discussing its creative intricacies.
“I always think about Walter Jr.,” he said. “I always think about the show. But you have to think about where the character would be and where it left off because the DEA got everything. In a real-life scenario, what would happen? All the bank accounts would be frozen; all the money would be gone. Send them to section eight housing and have a nice life.”
But just when it seemed as though students would hear only Mitte the pragmatic adult, Walter Jr. elbowed his way into the spotlight for a brief moment as Mitte described how exhausting acting can be.
“I’m going to Tijuana,” he said. Everyone laughed. Then Mitte paused, smiled and uttered a few simple words to send the Breaking Bad junkies home happy.
“Actually, I’m going to Belize.”
