Real people inspire fictional characters on TV and in movies. It is also not uncommon that they share the same names with actual people.
Some intentionally tell life stories in either biographical or non-biographical style, while others are pure coincidence.
When “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan invented his protagonist turned antagonist character Walter White, there was little evidence to support a claim that he knew anything about an actual man of the same name.
Gilligan once said that the inspiration for the character was none other than Tony Soprano, a fictional character from another popular series. The real Walter White cooked meth, too.
The fictional Walter White is a high school chemistry teacher. For much of his life, he never hurts a fly, let alone breaks any law.
When the going gets tough, especially now that he has been diagnosed with cancer, he decides to get his hands on cooking methamphetamine and becomes a master at it.
By the time Breaking Bad premiered in 2008, the real Walter White was already at the top of the business.
10 /10 A Meth Empire
About a decade before the rest of the world heard about Walter White, a character in AMC’s Breaking Bad, the people in Alabama’s illegal drug-dealing business circles knew of another meth cook named Walter White.
Like in the series, the actual White sat among the most respectable figures in a massive meth empire.
It was around the time that methamphetamine started to become a national epidemic.
The main ingredient for meth is pseudoephedrine, and a 2004 federal restriction on the chemical managed to reduce meth-related incidents a great deal.
9 /10 A New Cooking Method
Meth-related incidents skyrocketed again on a national scale from 2007 to 2011. Some cooks discovered a new and more straightforward method to manufacture the drugs on a large scale without setting up a massive operation.
They could produce meth from portable labs in hotel rooms or even vans.
All across the United States, meth was distributed in large volumes partly because the factories were easy to hide. An accurate depiction of the issue was also depicted in Breaking Bad.