While accepting a special honor at the Writers Guild Awards on Saturday night, Vince Gilligan warned the crowd that he was going to “go political” before calling on Hollywood to give more attention to good guys than the villains.
Presented with the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement at the Los Angeles ceremony, Gilligan acknowledged he was being honored because of Breaking Bad and writing “one of the all-time great bad guys” in Walter White.
“But all things being equal, I think I’d rather be celebrated for creating someone a bit more inspiring. In 2025, it’s time to say that out loud, because we are living in an era where bad guys, the real-life kind, are running amuck,” he said from the stage at the Beverly Hilton. “Bad guys who make their own rules, bad guys who no matter what they tell you, are only out for themselves. Who am I talking about? Well this is Hollywood, so guess. But here’s the weird irony, in our profoundly divided country, everybody seems to agree on one thing: there are too many real-life bad guys, it’s just we’re living in different realities so we’ve all got different lists.”
Gilligan added that while he didn’t know the solution to that, “As a writer, speaking to a room full of writers, I have a proposal; it certainly won’t fix everything but I think it’s a start. I say we write more good guys,” to big applause from the crowd. “For decades we made the villains too sexy,” with Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter as examples, and “viewers everywhere, all around the world, pay attention. They say here’s this badass, I want to be that cool. When that happens, fictional bad guys stop being the precautionary tales they were intended to be. God help us, they’ve become aspirational.”
“Maybe what the world needs now are some good, old-fashioned, greatest generation types who give more than they take,” Gilligan continued, musing how nice it was to hear about heroes and acts of kindness during the recent L.A. wildfires.
Though he advised writers to keep focusing on what they believe in and what excites them, he asked scribes to “give this some thought. Made-up bad guys are fun and they’re easier to write well, but maybe we could use a few more George Baileys and Andy Taylors. I think characters like that make our country a little bit better during some other tough times in our history; if I created them, I’d be proud, indeed.”
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