Anna Gunn holds tight on ‘Breaking Bad’ finale

We’ll learn soon enough the final fate of Anna Gunn’s long-suffering Skyler White when “Breaking Bad” returns for its last eight episodes on Sunday. But it’s hard to imagine it could be more dramatic than what went down in the final season’s first half, which saw Skyler melting down at the car wash (her “shut up” tirade toward sister Marie became a popular ringtone) and staging a fake-suicide wade into the water to get her children away from husband Walt.

How many times a day do you get asked how “Breaking Bad” is going to end?

I get asked countless numbers of times, and people sometimes think they can trick me into it.... I was just at the Sundance Institute doing the Directors Lab, and there was a night we were out having a good time, and people thought if perhaps there were enough drinks flowing that I might spill some beans, but we are well-trained. We are very well-trained — we never spilled a bean.

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Does it feel like you’ve been away for a while?

We’ve always had a hiatus, sometimes of six months. We had one that lasted almost a year. And so there’s going to be a little bit of a strange feeling, I think, in a few months’ time when it hits us that we’re actually not going to come back and do another season. But we’re close, and we’re going to continue to certainly get together and see each other. We’re a tight group.

But you will be reuniting for the “Breaking Bad” movie, right?

[Laughs] That’s right. You know, that’s been bandied about, the idea of a “Breaking Bad” movie. Certainly, we would all love that — I have no idea if that’s really something that’s a serious thing or not. If Vince [Gilligan, the show’s creator] wants to do that, we’re all up for it.

But that would mean the characters survive the series.

Hmm. Yes. Um. Trying to trap me, are you? Who knows? Anything could happen.

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Last season saw a remarkable story arc for Skyler, culminating with her walk into the pool almost trance-like in an effort to shock her sister into taking her kids away.

Yeah, that really was my favorite episode because it showed such a broad range of emotions for Skyler. She started out in kind of a state of paralysis that we hadn’t really seen her in before because it was really important to Vince that Skyler be a character of tremendous strength and steely backbone. So she had been trying so hard to be a person of action. And then she finally found herself in a place where she was stuck, really, really stuck for the first time — in a house with a man that she not only felt that she didn’t know but was really frightened, really, truly terrified of, and had one thing on her mind, which was, “How do I get my kids out of here, because I’m really scared that somebody’s going to come to this house and they’re going to kill my children.” And I think that just kept obsessively playing in her mind. And then finally, she figured out looking at that pool in that scene, “If I walk into this pool, if I do this, I can get my kids out of this house.”

How challenging was that scene for you?

It was very challenging, actually, because I’m a little bit claustrophobic and they had to rig a cage underwater for me to get that beautiful effect at the end where the blue skirt is around my head. So special effects had to rig a wire cage in the deep end of the pool and two divers had to take me under the deep end and set me into that cage, so I had to have a regulator. And I had to learn how to breathe with that, and it doesn’t sound like a big deal to somebody who is comfortable in the water and does that, but it was a big deal for me because I didn’t know how to do that, nor did I particularly want to learn how to do it. We probably did that shot about 4:00 in the morning — and it was cold and it was dark and big lights shining in the bottom of the pool, so it had a really closed-in, eerie effect. It’s kind of a freaky sensation to be dragged under and put into a wire cage underwater at night; you know, it’s a little weird.

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One of the most chilling lines in the series is, when after a long confrontation with Walt, Skyler simply says, “Well, I’ll wait then,” and he asks, “Wait for what?” “Wait for the cancer to return.”

She’s actually just saying, “I really don’t know what else to do. I’ve tried to think of all the options.” And it’s actually the worst thing she’s ever said to another human being. But Bryan [Cranston] and I really felt that it wasn’t out of vitriol, anger, it was out of absolute despair. And every time I said it — ugh, it was just so terrible — and we would cut, and Bryan and I would sort of reach out to each other because it was sort of heartbreaking.

Skyler can’t match Walt in Heisenberg mode but she can certainly have moments of her own, like when Jesse comes over to dinner and it’s going to be one of the more awkward dinner scenes in television history.

That was a fun scene to shoot. Aaron attacked his green beans with such gusto and then I attacked my wine [white grape juice] with gusto. And by the end of the night, the two of us were so sickened by the ingesting of those things, we were just clutching ourselves. But it was hard to keep a straight face with Aaron saying things to me like, “Mrs. White, these green beans ...,” you know, whatever his monologue was about how his mom used to make green bean casserole like that and he looked so uncomfortable. He was like the kid between the two parents looking back and forth between us like, “Oh, this is not good.” It was really funny. I loved it.

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Before DEA agent and brother-in-law Hank kind of catches on that Walt is a meth maker, the two families are having a nice lunch together. Where do you think Skyler is in those moments?

I think that hope has been living in her. Despite her sort of tough veneer and the fact that she holds everything very tightly within her, she really has been hoping all along that somehow, through some miracle, this thing can be resolved and that maybe they can get back to the life they once had. And it is the most naïve, sad kind of hope, but I think that it lives in her.

glenn.whipp@latimes.com