Bryan Cranston Talks Iconic ‘Breaking Bad’ Scene

You never know what Bryan Cranston is going to do next.

Star as Lyndon B. Johnson? Join a Power Rangers reboot? Become The Infiltrator? Play Pokémon Go?

But you definitely know what he did in the past, which was to bring home a sackload of Emmys for his portrayal of Walter White in Breaking Bad – a meek, terminally ill high school chemistry teacher who became a brutal meth overlord.

There was a pivotal scene in season four in which his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), urges him to give up the game, seek help from the police and admit that he is in danger.

“You clearly don’t know who you’re talking to, so let me clue you in,” he barked back at her. “I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger! A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!”

When PEOPLE and EW Editorial Director Jess Cagle sat down with Cranston for an edition of The Jess Cagle Interview, he asked the actor if he approached that scene as the moment in which the audience saw the crystallization of Walt into his meth-making alter ego, Heisenberg.

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“It was a transitional period for him, where we saw remnants…” Cranston says in this excerpt from the interview. “There was never a switch going from Walter White to Heisenberg. There was never a pulling down [of] a lever. It was gradual. It was losing Walt and gaining some of Heisenberg. And then it switches.”

To hear more from Cranston about that transformation and his time as Walter White, watch the video above and listen to the full interview this weekend on EW Radio (SiriusXM Ch. 105).