Michael Bowen plays the sociopathic, Aryan brotherhood member Jack Welker, who recently sat down with Vulture magazine for an interview on how his character made such a shocking impact on the show's final eight episodes.
Though not as meticulous and calculating as Gus Fring, Jack proved to be perhaps the most dangerous villian that Walter White ever became entangled with. Originally Walt's ally in a series of plots and prison murders, Jack quickly turned on his former business partner in favor of his $80 million buried out in the New Mexico desert. When you make a deal with the devil...
Bowen plays the uncle of Todd, an equally sociopathic, disturbingly frank and soft-spoken, who will go to great lengths to please his employers, even if it means murdering an innocent child or keeping Jesse Pinkman locked up in a dungeon as a meth-cook slave.
When asked if he and Plemons created a backstory for their character, Bowen told Vulture, "Yeah, absolutely. Jesse and I did that. We felt like Todd was in danger as a little boy with a drug-addicted mother - my sister. She had a revolving door of abusive boyfriends that Jack was tired of murdering constantly, so Jack got Todd out of there."
In their own backstory, Uncle Jack had a hand in raising Todd, saving his nephew from a horrible situation while bringing him into an equally bad one.
In the show, Bowen sports a Nazi symbol neck tattoo, as he is the leader of a local White Supremacist Gang.
"After studying the Aryan gangs and stuff like that, they're such a small fraction of the population in the prison system, yet they commit like a quarter of all of the most vile, gruesome murders in the system," Bowen said. "They have to do that because they are such a small group. They have to become so frightening that you don't mess with them. [Jack] knows to get into a gang like that, you must spill blood. And the only way you get out is if you are killed. So that's the reality he probably told and showed Todd."
Bowen looked at Jack as a "great white shark," who looks at everything his nephew does through "the rose-colored glasses of a proud father," especially when Todd killed the innocent boy Drew Sharp in season 4 at the end of a train robbery gone wrong.
"Here he is telling this crazy story, man, and he's not regretting any of it. He's reveling in it. And yes, I was proud. It's funny you say that because that's what's written on that script. "Proud proud proud." That's what I wrote as a side note," said Bowen.
As for working again with Aaron Paul, as the two both appeared in the 2009 remake of "Last House on the Left," Bowen called his Emmy award-winning acting "badass."
"He's really great. Talk about somebody joking around between setups. He’ll tell some horrible joke and two seconds later you’re rolling, and boom: He's crying, tears are coming out. He's just badass. Badass," Bowen said.
Click here to read Bowen's full interview with Vulture magazine.
