text: This is the beauty of collaboration. If Aaron Paul wasn’t the wonderful actor that he is we wouldn’t have wanted to keep him around […] It’s funny, people always say «Did you have it planned out from the beginning?», and I always say «No». At first I thought, «Gee, I wonder if I should lie?», and then I finally realized it’s to be embraced that it’s not all planned out from the beginning. Because if you could pick and choose from all the best opportunities and talents and artistry available to you, and find your way through your story based on those considerations, it makes it so much richer, better, deeper and more complex, with more layers of the onion, so to speak, than you could ever come up with all by yourself, and if you rigidly adhere to your first idea.1Se https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOT1d4DC5tE.
  I think when we started off season 1, we would have expected that Jimmy McGill would start calling himself Saul Goodman, and would have the crazy office by the end of the first season. What we found was there was a lot more to say about Jimmy McGill than we thought there was. And there's a lot more to say about these other characters around him, especially Chuck and Mike. The characters did things that surprised us. Clearly, what I was talking about was that we didn't know when we started who Chuck really was. One of the things that was truly delightful to me and exciting to me about working on this show is that once we saw Michael McKean playing the scenes in the first few episodes, we saw a guy who was much more imposing than the character we had originally conceived — somebody with a lot more pride. And that opened up a world of conflict (Sepinwall, 2015: upaginert).