⇢ character information

[rehabbed]

CHARACTER☰ NAME ▹ Jesse Pinkman

☰ CANON ▹ Breaking Bad @ BrBa Wiki

☰ CANON POINT ▹ I will play Jesse from any point between s2 and s5!

☰ HISTORY ▹ Jesse Pinkman @ BrBa Wiki

☰ AGE ▹ 25

☰ HEIGHT ▹ 5'8" / 173cm

☰ WEIGHT ▹ ~143lbs / ~65kg

☰ BUILD ▹ Skinny, lean, "junkie metabolism"

☰ HAIR ▹ Dark blond

☰ EYES ▹ Blue

☰ GENDER ▹ Cis male

☰ DEFINING MARKS ▹ Tattoos; sunspots and large freckles on shoulders

APPEARANCE

SETTINGSet in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Breaking Bad is a high-action, thriller-suspense tv show about Walter White, a disillusioned and underachieving high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Faced with the prospect of dying within a year, he teams up with former chemistry student and burnout junkie, Jesse Pinkman and begins a venture into methamphetamine production in order to secure his family's financial future. What starts out as clumsy, disorganised chaos, with Walter and Jesse muddling their way through figuring out how to navigate the world of high-level crime and dangerous criminals, quickly transforms into a dark and depraved descent into greed, power and murder.

PERSONALITY☰ INTELLIGENT & OBSERVANT ▹ Though Jesse is uneducated and sees himself as stupid (a burnout who dropped out of high school to pursue a life as a career criminal in meth manufacturing), he is actually highly intelligent due to how observant he is. He learns things very quickly, and due to his high level street smarts, he notices things about people and situations that he is quick to pick up on and adapt to.

☰ A HEDONISTIC ADDICT ▹ Addiction is Jesse's maladaptive coping mechanism. It's been his escapism from responsibilities, his own self-hatred, and the consequences of his actions since he was a young teenager. Being hedonistic and always seeking instant gratification, addiction feeds directly into that. Meth is his drug of choice, but so is meaningless hookups and fast cars. Anything to get his adrenalin racing and his mind occupied from things he doesn't want to face within himself.

☰ EMOTIONAL & EMPATHETIC ▹ Jesse has always been lead by his heart, his sensitivities, and his desperation to be loved and accepted. This trait of his is a huge part of why Jesse was never really meant for the hardened, high-level criminal lifestyle. He cries when he's distressed, or sad, or afraid. He adores children, and has a childlike fascination towards animals and nature. He explodes with emotion through anger, and feels deeply cut when rejected or made to feel worthless. He is highly empathetic underneath how tough he tries to appear. A caretaker by nature, he can't help being drawn towards caring about people, because that is what his true nature is beneath his toxic masculinity and criminal lifestyle bravado.

☰ A LEADER WHO THINKS HE'S A FOLLOWER ▹ This is how Breaking Bad creator and writer, Vince Gilligan, describes Jesse in a sentence. Because of his street smarts and sharp observational intelligence, Jesse knows how to manipulate a situation to his advantage if he can see that there is a common thing people want. He can pull together a team of people and make them focus on a task, and will delegate roles in order to get that job done efficiently. When in his element, he takes no shit and commands respect. Full of self-doubt and a near-crippling need for approval from others, however, he often shrinks into the disillusioned follower role, doing as he's told and following orders, even when he absolutely despises being belittled and made to feel inferior. Jesse's problem is, due to habitual laziness, being an addict, and being raised in a household where all his strengths were deemed weaknesses by his parents, he is convinced he's too dumb and useless to learn technical and complicated things. He shirks responsibilities in favour of getting high and getting laid because he thrives off instant gratification; it's how he copes with his crippingly low self-esteem and firm belief that he will never be truly worthwhile to anyone.

☰ CHAOTIC NEUTRAL ANTI-VILLAIN ▹ Jesse is an unrepentant criminal, but he approaches that with contradicting moral dilemmas. He has a code of ethics when it comes to his criminal choices: He hates murder, he hates violence, he hates cruelty and sadism. He longs to protect innocent people who don't deserve suffering. This is what sets him apart from other criminals within the meth business and makes him the anti-villain among villains. He doesn't like being around the evil guys, but he also doesn't like being held back by the good guys. Acts of kindness and benevolence are rewarding to him, but he also can be ruthless and extremely indifferent to the feelings of others when he has an agenda in mind. Jesse is a provider who thinks outside the box. He likes providing because it makes him feel valued and wanted, but he also likes providing because it means opportunities to ask for favours done in return that benefit his agendas. Jesse knows how to work in a team, but he also values freedom and individualism above all else. Jesse is the kind of guy who is willing to do criminal things if it ultimately means achieving something for the greater good.

TATTOOS

MANNERISMS☰ VOICE ▹ Jesse has a deep, gruff voice. He talks very colloquially, with a lot of slang thrown in. Because of the way in which he talks, people tend to see Jesse as stupid, dumb and not worth having anything of note to say. He is, actually, extremely smart. A clip that demonstrates his manner of talking/depth of voice.

☰ GESTURES ▹ Jesse can never sit still. He is always fidgeting with his hands, be that subtly picking at his fingernails, jiggling his leg, or twiddling with whatever is in his hands. He almost always seems full of restless energy. When he's anxious, he's even more restless, and when exasperated or stressed, he has a habit of smearing his hands down his face. His hands and what his hands are doing is always a good indicator of his emotional state.

MAJOR INFLUENCING EVENTS — ***SPOILER WARNINGS***☰ UPBRINGING ▹ From the day Jesse was born, his parents groomed and set him up for failure before he even got a start in life. They wanted a masculine, academic and high-achieving son. Jesse was the complete opposite: highly sensitive, emotional, empathic, giftedly artistic, a free spirit, a boy who wore his heart on his sleeve and fell in love way too fast because of how much love he had to give. Traits that his parents deemed as weaknesses and worthless rather than strengths that deserved to be nurtured. Even when he took the initiative to care for his dying aunt when nobody else in his family would step up to the task, his parents continued to see Jesse as a mooching failure rather than recognising they had a son who had an innate caring nature that longed to help people. And so, he embraced the disappointment he knew he was in their eyes as a means to shield himself from how lonely and full of instilled self-loathing he really was, which is what led him onto the path of drug use and drug dealing.

☰ WALTER WHITE ▹ What Jesse longed for most was acceptance and approval. He craved to be valued, to belong, to be loved. Out of all the things that made Jesse vulnerable both in life and in the criminal world, this is what made Jesse the most vulnerable, especially to the likes of people like Walter White. Though Jesse has never been unintelligent, he is uneducated, which Jesse has always equated with unintelligence, and Walter White used key points of low self-esteem like that in Jesse to his advantage. One second, Walt would be gaslighting and abusing Jesse, accusing him of being a failure and a worthless junkie; the next second, Walt would turn around and encourage Jesse, treating him almost like a cherished son, only to tear that down again in the next second to make Jesse feel worthless and stupid all over again. For that reason, Jesse found himself quickly tangled up in knots of guilt whenever he started to question his loyalty to Walt, because he didn't see it as a fault with Walt so much as a fault, perhaps even a sickness, within himself. Jesse has destroyed himself, but nobody has enabled him to do that more than Walter White, who deliberately sought to destroy Jesse to keep Jesse useful and loyal.

☰ DEATH OF JANE ▹ This event was a catalyst moment for Jesse. He not only lost the love of his life - a relationship that was doomed from the start, being it was built on drug dependence and addiction - but Walt left Jesse thinking, in the aftermath of Jane's death, that it was Jesse's fault. Walt could have saved Jane - he stood over her and watched her die, and did nothing. He could have told Jesse he watched Jane die and did nothing. But he did neither, and when Jesse awoke the next morning to find Jane dead in bed beside him, it sent him on a tailspin of drug abuse, homelessness and near-suicidal self-destruction, eventually landing him in rehab. It was here that Jesse learned about self-acceptance, and his guilt over what happened to Jane and his self-hated led him to realise: He accepts that he's the bad guy. And this acceptance is what led Jesse onto a much darker path from that point forward.

☰ GALE BOETTICHER'S MURDER ▹ Jesse has ever been the kind of guy who actually fitted into the organised criminal world and lifestyle. Violence, sadism, ruthlessness, blood, carnage, death - these are all things Jesse wanted no part in throughout Walt's descent into power-hungry greed, yet found himself sucked into the vortex of it all anyway. The biggest vortex of all was having to kill Gale Boetticher, the chemist Gus had hired to work in his superlab whom Walt saw as a "problem" that had to be "put down" in order to save his and Jesse's life. Jesse absolutely did not want to kill Gale - he implored with Walt that there had to be some other way, because the thought of killing an innocent person went against everything he never wanted to be. But Jesse wound up backed into a corner where Walt gave him no choice, and so in desperation to survive, he shot Gale point-blank in the face… and this was the biggest turning point for Jesse in the entire show; this was the moment that the old Jesse died completely and transformed into a decayed, cancerous shadow of his former self, and the more murders that took place from that point forward, the more his conscience eroded away.

☰ DREW SHARP'S MURDER ▹ The final tipping point was Drew Sharp's murder - a little boy, murdered by Todd in cold blood to "remove a witness". Children are the one thing Jesse feels the strongest moral pull towards; Jesse will go above and beyond to protect children, to the point where he will even abandon his principles of "no murder" to murder a person who harms or kills children. The death of Drew Sharp became the turning point for Jesse to decide he can't do the meth business anymore, further compounded by the realisation that Walt had also killed Mike; he couldn't handle the death of one more innocent person, and he absolutely couldn't handle being complicit in the death of children. The death of Drew Sharp, and knowing Walt had murdered Mike, eats him up inside so much that he demands for Saul to give half of his three million dollars meth money to Drew Sharp's family and the other half to the Mike's granddaughter. And when he can't get rid of the cash, he goes on a reckless spree of throwing millions and millions of dollars out of his car window while driving through the streets of New Mexico at night, desperate to get rid of this money that has nothing but blood all over it.

ABILITIES☰ A fast, highly observant and apt learner who is far smarter than he realises

☰ Highly skilled at setting up, organising and operating a black market

☰ Extremely good with children
☰ Exceptional street smarts

☰ Knows how to make poisons, explosives and homemade batteries (limited to what Walt taught him)

☰ NOT superhuman, superpowered or with any enhanced abilities beyond human

STRENGTHS☰ Crafty, cunning & highly observant

☰ Highly resourceful

☰ Thinks outside the box

☰ Deeply nurturing towards people he cares about

☰ Highly ambitious once he has a goal set in mind

☰ Will work himself to the bone for a cause he is set on

☰ Strong sense of justice towards cruelty & sadism

☰ A survivor

☰ Exceedingly loyal to those he trusts

☰ Hero conscience

WEAKNESSES☰ Drug addict & addictive personality

☰ Self-destructive

☰ Deeply damaged

☰ Deeply mistrusts & disrespects authority

☰ Suffocated by an unshakeable guilt complex

☰ Extremely emotionally masochistic

☰ His traumas have caused him to become very ruthless

☰ His loyalty can lead him right into chaos

☰ Mentally unstable due to his traumas

☰ Villain complex

HOW WELL JESSE GENERALLY GETS ALONG WITH OTHERS(N.B. This is describing Jesse in summation of his entire canon development.) Jesse is extremely observant, a caretaker by nature, and has learned many things from Gus, Mike and Walt about how to manipulate and work a situation to his advantage. Jesse is very good at strategising and coming up with ideas outside the box. He adores kids and will go out of his way to protect them at all costs, and is exceedingly loyal to those who are loyal to him. Jesse also takes no shit from people — he can spot bullshit a mile off. Jesse knows how to work very well with others, especially at the canon point I'm bringing him in, despite his deep-seated issues and trauma.

JESSE'S MENTAL STATE(N.B. This description is in summation of Jesse's entire character development.) After all Walt's sociopathic gaslighting and mental abuse, Jesse is pretty unhinged. He can stay disturbingly cool and collected in very dire situations, but has a trigger hair rage that can switch on suddenly when confronted with cruelty towards children, innocent people or people he loves/is deeply loyal to. Jesse is a cold-blooded murderer who hates murder, but will kill without question if it means protecting the innocent, himself or his own interest. Jesse is a deeply broken man with excessive levels of self-hatred, is emotionally masochistic, self-destructive, and is capable of being terrifying when he loses his shit.