With the return of Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) in the El Camino movie comes the return of his longtime friend, Breaking Bad's Skinny Pete (Charles Baker).
For five seasons, Pete stuck by Jesse's side through all his ups and downs, and now it looks like he will serve as refuge for Jesse as he hides from the authorities in El Camino. The trailer for the Breaking Bad movie picks up where the series left off: Jesse escaped the compound where he was being held captive and drove off in an El Camino car.
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In the trailer, he shows up on Skinny Pete's doorstep, looking for a place to hide from the police and DEA agents that are after him for cooking meth and killing all the white supremacists at the drug compound where Jesse was imprisoned and tortured. In reality, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) killed all those people, but he's dead. So the police have no one to go after now except Jesse.
The agents even call Skinny Pete in for questioning, but he refuses to give them any information about Jesse's whereabouts. "I have no idea where he is, don't know where he's headed either. North, south, east, west, Mexico, the moon. I don't have a clue," Skinny Pete says in the trailer. "But yo, even if I did. I wouldn't tell you because I've been watching the news same as everybody else. I've seen that little cage of his they kept him in. I heard about what all they did to him to make sure he kept cooking. So sorry, I don't know what to tell you. No way I'm helping you people put Jesse Pinkman back in a cage."
It's not surprising that Pete would have Jesse's back. Their friendship can be traced back to the first season, where Skinny Pete was actually the one who introduced Jesse to the drug kingpin Tuco Salamanca. Without Skinny Pete, none of them may have ended up in the mess they did.
Pete also helped Jesse out in the early seasons by dealing the meth Jesse was cooking, even though Pete was worried about getting caught and sent back to prison. (He'd already served time at the start of the series.) After one of his dealer friends was arrested and another was killed, Pete quit the business all together in season 2. But he was back at it in season 3, where Pete targeted Narcotics Anonymous meetings to make his sales. He gave it up when the recovery program at the meetings started to actually work on him. But then he slipped up and used meth in season 4 at Jesse's house. Most of the show was like that for him. He would want to do better, fall back into old habits, recover, revert, etc.
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The last time fans saw Skinny Pete was in the final episode of the series. He and Jesse's other friend Badger (Matthew Lee Jones) helped Walt by pointing a red lasers at Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz (Adam Godley and Jessica Hecht) through their window, thereby tricking them into thinking they had hitmen watching them. It was part of Walt's plan to force them into giving his family money after he died. Badger and Skinny Pete were also responsible for letting Walt know that his meth was still on the streets, which meant that Jesse is still alive and being forced to cook. That set Walt off on his journey to rescue Jesse.
Baker was really excited to revisit his character's path beyond that scene and into the El Camino movie. He told AfterBuzz TV that he actually thought Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan was calling about a role that Baker had pitched for Better Call Saul, but it was for the top secret movie instead.
"We all know we were back to making something special again," Baker said of arriving on set. He added to Red Carpet Report that he thinks fans will "love" the movie because "it’s pure Breaking Bad." And there's just no Breaking Bad without Skinny Pete.