Like many aspiring actors in Albuquerque in the late 2000s, Shenoah landed a speaking role in the hit TV series “Breaking Bad.” Here he contrasts the TV portrayal of his hometown with the city he knows and reveals how the “Breaking Bad” phenomenon has transformed and revitalized Albuquerque, the gritty backdrop of his new Edinburgh show Bloodlust Summertime
Put on your mental tracksuit, jog the deep reaches of your memory and you might remember me in the hit television series, Breaking Bad.
Let me help. One of the most accurate elements of the show’s portrayal of Albuquerque, my home town, is Saul Goodman’s advertising campaign. Oh yes, my desert motherland boasts an endless onslaught of tacky lawyers and their cheesy-as-nachos, cheaply-made TV commercials.
Two of America’s biggest interstates intersect right in the middle of our city, both fringed with towering and shameless billboards of suited up, legal eagles, all vying for the top spot of, most annoying – and as such most memorable – ambulance chaser in town. “Hurt? Call Burt?” or the moustachioed, law shark, Ron Bell’s “I still sue drunk drivers” looming in six-foot letters around his accusing pointer finger. The “still” having been added after his own drunk driving conviction.
In the show I had the (genuine) honour of playing “Schlubby Guy Number 2” in one of Saul Goodman’s sweet-ass, lame commercials. In the striped suit of a jailbird, I squealed to the camera “I had a good job until my boss accused me of stealing. I better call Saul!” Surely it was my delivery of the iconic line that landed Odenkirk the spin off series.
I’m not the only local who got a part. The show is crawling with every community theatre actor I ever wound up on stage with and countless resurfacing faces from my high school drama club, making the show both a yearbook and a ragtag family reunion.
Does BB accurately depict Albuquerque with all the show’s drugs and violence? Well, yes, but it’s missing something. The Land of Enchantment is New Mexico’s state slogan and the place is a magnet for the alternative breed. There’s no shortage of earth-ships (passive solar homes made of upcycled materials like tires filled with natural materials like dirt aka earth) and if you scattered the population of the Burning Man festival across New Mexico it’s doubtful anyone would notice because they’d blend right in.
So, the Breaking Bad depiction isn’t entirely accurate because there’s also a lot of strangeness, vitality and art. I’ve never seen a severed head riding on the back of a tortoise for example. I mean, did drink wine out of a real life, honest-to-goodness human skull, but that was part of a zen ritual in a New Mexican Buddhist monastery not under the menacing threat of a drug lord.
The violence exists though as does the meth and crack and whatever else you like (yes you specifically)
Oddly BB doesn’t explore the negative side of meth much, it’s portrayed mostly as a super clean drug that makes you rich. The truth is, meth speeds you all the way up, but coming down is hard so it’s much better to just go up again, which leads to prolonged sleep deprivation which leads to paranoid delusions and who knows? You may find yourself being the guy who shot my neighbour in the ass with a real gun and stole his car (true story) Or try your hand at meth fuelled repairs like the handymen at my dad’s house who got into an axe fight on the job. Amazingly they both survived.
Crystal meth has its perks too:
Here’s a snippet of conversation between two of my friends in a Dunkin ‘Donuts when we were teenagers.
“How’d you lose all that weight”
“Are you kidding, speed diet, crystal.”
Though I don’t remember the meth having the trade mark glacial blue, it does in Breaking Bad. Be that as it may, the tweakers are defo adding blue food colouring to their batches now to increase its market value.
The show’s been good for Albuquerque and it’s a fun irony that a crystal-meth driven, modern western has had a gentrifying effect on the high-murder-count town I grew up in. Now we have bronze statues of Walter and Jessie, all manner of blue confectionery made to resemble Heisenberg’s product and Netflix has since bought studios there and sunk around a billion USD into the local economy with billions more in the pipeline.
Nina Conti and I shot our feature film, Sunlight in Albuquerque. (premiering at this year’s Edinburgh International film festival August) And the “Breaking Bad” effect was helpful for that also. The Breaking Bad crews had been through all the red tape previously. So our location scouts, for example, knew which roads we could close for filming, which locations would work etc – so they had done all the hard work in terms of making the filming in Albuquerque possible. (I’m beyond thrilled about our film check it out here https://www.edfilmfest.org/film/sunlight/)
My show is about growing up in this wondrous place, this strange city in this strange land and it certainly shares some of the grit of Breaking Bad, though it’s more acid dipped than meth headed.
Shenoah Allen’s Bloodlust Summertime, 19.45 Just the Tonic, August 1-25. The show was developed in collaboration with Kim Noble.
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/shenoah-allen-bloodlust-summertime (or pay what you want).
