How Walter White from 'Breaking Bad' is an inspiration for an anti-hero

Who is Walter White?

Walter White was a fictional character created for the TV Drama 'Breaking Bad', a show about a man who was once a promising chemist, and the founder of multi-billion dollar company: Grey Matter. However, he sold his share in the company and settled down to become a high school chemistry teacher. After being diagnosed with lung cancer on the day of his 50th birthday, Walter White realised that he didn’t have the money to pay for his chemotherapy or the surgery to remove the cancer. Upon seeing his brother-in-law DEA officer Hank in action in a drug raid and seeing the large amounts of money taken from the methamphetamine dealers, Walter reunites with ex-student and drug addict Jesse Pinkman to build up their own drug business to help Walter pay for his treatment.

How is he an inspiration for Sean Finch?

Walter is an ideal comparison to our character of Sean Finch in terms of being an anti-hero as they both do dark deeds for good intentions. In Walter’s case, it is cooking methamphetamine and building a drug empire, and in Sean’s case it is making a decision of whether or not to carry out a list of assassinations in fewer than 36 hours to save his own life. Looking forward in terms of the potential entirety of our thriller, we could also play Sean even more against the character of Walter White by putting him in similar dilemmas, for instance how Walter "earns" enough money to be able to support his family after his death, yet decides to carry on the cooking as he enjoys the thrill and wishes to make as much money as possible, eventually ending up with more money than he or his family know what to do with; similarly Sean may end up enjoying the thrill of killing and violence so much that, upon completing the 36 hour contract and being given the antidote to the toxin, he may even go on to kill Sebastian for injecting him in the first place, or we could swap the scenario entirely and Sean could disregard the contract, accept death and focus on simply killing Sebastian instead. Either way, the opening sequence to our thriller will only show enough of Sean’s character to make the audience ask themselves the question of whether or not he will indeed fulfil the 36 hour contract, or if he will let himself die.