Breaking Bad stars reunite for PopCorners Super Bowl ad - and it's like Jesse and Walter never left

As Aaron Paul and his daughter made their way toward their seats at an Olivia Rodrigo concert in May, the 43-year-old actor figured he’d pass through the crowd at Hollywood’s Greek Theater with little notice.

After all, the largely high school-age students were still toddlers when Paul’s embattled Jesse Pinkman began a five-year run on Breaking Bad in 2008. These kids, he figured, were watching Nickelodeon rather than amateur meth producers when he and Bryan Cranston launched an iconic five-season run on AMC.

No matter.

"It was as if I was some rock star at this concert," Pinkman tells USA TODAY of his perspective at teen idol Rodrigo’s first major L.A. appearance. "The entire stadium started going nuts and I was going, 'Wait, these girls are watching the show right now?'

"It was pretty surreal."

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Sunday, Pinkman, Cranston and Raymond Cruz will reunite for the masses in a 60-second Super Bowl ad for PopCorners, the Frito-Lay snack brand. Super Bowl ad buys – and this year, $7 million is the going rate for 30 seconds – tend to tilt toward opposite poles: Going big for a superstar with pop culture currency or leaning hard into nostalgia.

But director Vince Gilligan’s revival of Walter White, Pinkman and Tuco Salamanca suggests a different arc: That this vanguard of prestige TV, with its 58 Emmy nominations and 16 trophies, never faded from the zeitgeist.

"The passion for the show has never waned," says Cruz, who probably steals the scene when Salamanca reacts to a hit of PopCorners almost exactly as he did when first sampling White’s 99.1% pure "blue sky" meth. "I see new generations just discovering it, binge-watching it and they come up and they’re like, 'Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, I can’t believe it’s you.'

"I love the show. Having the opportunity to work on Breaking Bad, to work on an iconic show and create a character that’s lasted the test of time, and for the chance PopCorners has given us to be on this stage, on a Super Bowl commercial, a larger audience can re-experience Breaking Bad like they never have before."

It might be hard to tell the 60-second remake from the original.

Paul and Cruz say there’s no way they could have pulled it off without Gilligan, whom they respectively call their "fearless leader" and "mastermind." And quite literally everything else from the show fell into place:

The same RV where White and Pinkman first cooked, parked on the same stunning vista on a New Mexico reservation. The same garish, untucked dress shirt Salamanca wore when he agreed to go into business with this odd couple. Even the chain hanging from his neck was dug out of Sony’s archives.

It created a startling déjà vu for the actors.

"To zip on these skins again from the show was surreal," says Paul. "I really never thought I would be jumping around in that clothing ever again, but here we are."

Cruz said it was like they had "walked through a portal and we were back in time on the Breaking Bad set, as if no time had passed." Yet it took Cruz some effort to revive Tuco’s volatility, digging into his own archives to study notes he takes on every character he portrays.

"I don’t live in Tuco Salamanca," says Cruz, "so to get back in that headspace is not an easy task. Luckily, I keep track of everything I ever work on. So I was able to go through my notes and put the character back together. But to step on the set with Vince Gilligan and Aaron and Walter White, it felt like you were back in time. It really did."

Many Breaking Bad bonds continued unabated. Paul says he and Cranston talk "truly every day" and that Cranston is godfather to his son, Ryden. Paul himself seems virtually ageless, his gravelly, youthful tone immediately recognizable. Endorsing a snack treat seems more than appropriate given his slacker leitmotif.

"Todd Chavez would absolutely love PopCorners," Paul says of the do-nothing, Kato Kaelin-like houseguest he portrayed in Netflix’s animated Bojack Horseman.

Yet for one minute, Jesse Pinkman will return, along with Tuco and Cranston’s White’s Heisenberg, hat and all. While it’s not the silver bullet to solve advertisers’ recognition challenge in this era of entertainment stratification, it will surely stop many viewers mid-bite.

And for those who don’t get it, Paul figures it’s never too late to start.

"I just know it’s going to play so well even though the show technically ended years ago, yet so many new people are just now diving into it," he says. "It’s going to feel very current to them, and nostalgic for others. It’s just such a fun spot all around and anybody that’s a fan of the show is really going to connect with it.

"And anybody who hasn’t heard of the show or hasn’t dived in yet, it could be the domino to fall to help them start watching it. We had the best time doing it and I think people will see the fun of it right away."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: PopCorners' Breaking Bad Super Bowl ad brings back Walter, Jesse, Tuco