(Photo by Getty Images / Jesse Grant / Stringer)
RJ Mitte rose to awareness as Walter White, Jr. in Breaking Bad. While Mitte’s own case of cerebral palsy is less severe than that of the character he played, he serves as spokesperson for several organizations devoted to helping people with disabilities — including actors and others in the media. He also keeps up with his acting career, as evidenced by his most recent film outing, Who’s Driving Doug.
Mitte talked to us here at Rotten Tomatoes about five of his favorite movies — a choice selection of action and sci-fi. You can see if the films that excite him get you excited too:
All these stories piling together and crossing over — I think that is the simplicity of life — these five degrees of separation that divide us all. I think it was a great cast of people; it’s a good story. Films that I enjoy are films that tell stories and not necessarily on the bounds of believable, but in life, anything can happen. I like action films. I guess Pulp Fiction is fairly violent, but I’m an action film kind of guy. It depends on what I’m in the mood for when it comes down to it.
The first one with Brandon Lee. The whole set — it was a really cool set — I liked the whole vibe of it with the martial arts. I was a Brandon Lee fan, and that was a fairly bad-ass movie. That whole Hell’s Kitchen vibe in New York — that whole realm just has this cool mystifying vibe. It looked like it would be a fun set.
I watched Serenity before Firefly [the TV series it was based on]. In 2000, binge-viewing wasn’t something that we did; we didn’t have access to that. If you missed a TV series, you just missed it. Or you’d record it on your VHS, right? It was a chore. In 2002 I was more of a country boy; I was always outside. But I like the whole idea of Serenity, the whole world, that outer rim world that we imagine that one day we will be [part of]. I actually felt this wasn’t too far out of our limits. You look at that ship, and it’s a junky old beat up ship. You would think after a thousand years, we will have things like that — that will fly and that will do things like that. We do. We have shuttles and they don’t look too far off [from those]. [That world is] only going to get closer into our grasp.
I feel like at one point or another, this is everyone’s favorite movie. Danny Elfman is amazing. I’m a big fan of stop motion. I really have an admiration and appreciation for [it]. I think they do such an amazing job, and they take so long to make. It’s almost flawless. You can’t even tell that they’re fake toys. It looks like animation. I like the music; it was amazing. Danny Elfman always does it with his scores, and Tim Burton is really rad. It’s done so well for the time. That’s a movie that will come around every so often that will just hang in the air and will never — no matter how good the graphics get, or how good your TV gets — at the end of the day, it will never folly. There are some things you’ll put on and go “It looked like that?” But when you watch Nightmare Before Christmas, you know it never gets bad or old. The music is always amazing, and they worked really hard. And that rings through. Stop motion is so great.
The vibe of it — I always felt like this was an all-around bad-ass cop movie. I could try to go into detail about certain things about it that stood out to me, about how it all takes place in one day and how he sets him up throughout the whole day. It was done right. It was one of those movies that was just set up right.
Who’s Driving Doug is now showing in limited release and on premiere Video-on-Demand.
