'Better Call Saul' Postmortem: Jonathan Banks Talks Mike Ehrmantraut’s Crushing Loss, Jesse Pinkman, and Not Hating Jimmy McGill

Breaking Bad fans have been wondering for years about the backstory of Gus Fring fixer Mike Ehrmantraut, and in the Better Call Saul gut punch of an episode, “Five-O,” we found out not only that former Philadelphia cop Mike blames himself for the murder of his cop son by a duo of dirty cops, but also that Mike’s son had learned that his dad was among those crooked policeman he’d considered turning in to Internal Affairs.

Emmy-nominated Jonathan Banks — who should have sewn up another nomination with his performance in “Five-O” — talks to Yahoo TV about how he sparked the idea for his character’s past, the most heartbreaking thing about his character’s time on Breaking Bad, what motivates Mike to keep going after the guilt and shame of being involved with his son’s murder, and how he has ideas for what else he’d like us to learn about Mr. Ehrmantraut’s pre-Albuquerque life.

This is the episode we’ve been waiting on for years, and it was worth the wait.
Thank you. That’s very kind.

Related: 'Better Call Saul' Recap: 'Five-O'

You’ve mentioned in interviews that when Better Call Saul producer and showrunner Peter Gould approached you about the spinoff, he brought up something you had previously suggested for the character. Was this backstory always your backstory, your idea of what Mike had been through, what had happened to him and his son?
I think that is a very sensitive place, because the reality is that the writers are always going to have control of it with their pens. But there’s no way that you do a character this long and you don’t develop your ideas and your own backstory. I’ll be doing Mike’s backstory probably for the next 20 years. I’ll never stop [thinking about] Mike’s backstory.

You had an idea that this tragic thing had happened to him.
My whole idea was that however Mike became so broken and lost his soul had to do with his son. That’s exactly what I said many years ago.

And that backstory resonates on multiple levels, because it explains not only why Mike is so sad but also why he’s willing to work with the kinds of people we know he’ll become involved with. And why he’s so loyal to “his guys” during Breaking Bad, why he has this code he works by.
Exactly, exactly. I think one of the hardest things for me on Breaking Bad wasn’t so much my death, but in the storyline it was visceral for me when my guys got killed, when they got killed in such horrible fashions. Had I had anything to do with it, I would have been going, “No, Mike wouldn’t let this happen to his guys.”

It also so closely mirrors what we find out in “Five-O.” Walter White killed Mike’s men without having a real reason to; he had no concrete reason to believe they would rat him out. And Mike’s son was the victim of a very similar situation, though he was not a dirty cop himself.
Exactly.

Finding out this history of Mike’s also explains why he felt so fatherly toward Jesse on Breaking Bad.
Yeah. I mean, that was one of those things, too, it’s hard not to play that way, because Aaron [Paul] is dear to me. I love Aaron. Then all of a sudden, you have this wayward kid who… I’ve always said, I don’t think Mike thinks he can, I don’t know it would be the truthful answer if Mike even thinks that he can save Jesse, but he certainly wants to protect him.

What happens to Mike is so crushing. What motivated him to go on after that? Was it really all about his granddaughter, Kaylee, and trying to secure her future?
It’s not only about Kaylee. It’s about his daughter-in-law. He’s participated in taking the man that was her husband, the father of her child, away. He owes her his life, essentially.

There’s a great scene with Mike and Jimmy in Jimmy’s car after they’ve just left the interrogation room, and Jimmy asks how Mike knew that Jimmy would go along with the coffee cup spill. How did Mike know?
You know what? I got to be honest with you, Kim. Mike’s rolling the dice. He might know, but I think Mike hoped more than he knew.

Given what he’d seen Jimmy do, and how Jimmy operates, probably made him feel it was less of a gamble…
Absolutely. Jimmy needs to be a survivor right now, and you play into that. Mike needs to be a survivor, too.

Will we find out more about Mike’s backstory, in terms of his life in Philadelphia when he was a cop? His wife, his son, maybe in flashbacks before his son was killed?
You’re on the same track I am. [I’m] going to do a podcast [with the writers], and I probably have called the writers twice, maybe three times, in five years. I’m just not one of those hands-on people. I take what I’m given, and I act. But tomorrow I asked for five minutes before we do our podcast, because I have some ideas that I’d like… one of them, yeah, it has to do with Mike’s death. I really can’t tell you much more than that because then I’ll be giving something away if it ever comes to fruition.

Related: 14 Spinoffs You Forgot Existed

Got it. But you do have some ideas or some things that you would like to see happen with the character.
Oh my God, do I ever! Oh, yeah!

I read recently someone’s description of the Mike and Jimmy/Saul relationship as being a relationship where the two hate each other, but do you think that’s true?
No. No, Mike doesn’t hate Jimmy or Saul at all. At all. He may irritate Mike. Mike may think he’s a jerk, but no, he doesn’t hate him.

He almost seems amused by him some of the time.
He is.

Unlike with most TV shows, you obviously know how Mike’s story ends. Do you have to ignore that to keep it from affecting how you play this part of the character’s life?
Yes, absolutely. When Mike chooses a way… when you kill someone, you pretty much figure that that’s the way you’re going to go, too. I think Mike knows he’s going to die violently. I think he absolutely knows that’s the way he’s going to die. Listen, he doesn’t set out for that to happen. Somebody said to me a long time ago, if Mike ever got out of it, where would he be? I said he’d be on the Mediterranean, in Spain, late at night and in a piano bar listening to the waves come up against the rocks.

And he would be looking for updates on Kaylee, of course. He would always want to know what was going on with her.
Always. Always. And probably would be looking, as soon as she got old enough that she could travel unaccompanied, to bring her to the Costa Blanca.

Better Call Saul airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on AMC.