Michael Mando says he was told: "Brace yourself for a tour de force performance"

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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...hael-mando-603

"I received a call the winter before we started shooting," Mando says of this week's episode. "I was in Montreal. )(Executive producers) Peter (Gould), Vince (Gilligan), and Melissa (Bernstein) said, 'Brace yourself for a tour de force performance. We will require you to be physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. You’re gonna have your own feature film inside this season.' And I was immediately grateful for the challenge." Mando adds: "You know, those guys are the best in the business and they always deliver. To play a character that’s breaking good when the whole show seems to be breaking bad has really turned into a dream role of mine." As for filming the final scene, Mando says: "That whole episode was riddled with symbolism in real life. I had cut my finger really deeply. I was doing my own stunts and I had cut my thumb, and I couldn’t shoot for about a week and a half because I had lost sensation in all the nerves in my left arm. And the day we were shooting that final scene, right before we turned the cameras on Nacho, a huge sandstorm hit and we had to literally run back to our cars and leave the desert before our cars would sink in. When I went home that day, lightning struck the tree in front of my house and it fell in front of my driveway and I couldn’t get in. There was all this symbolism, where we were kind of giggling, going, 'What is going on?'"

ALSO:

• Michael Mando on filming the oil tanker scene: "It’s kind of like a vegetable thing that they’ve extracted," he says. "I was there for maybe a minute or two, I think, under the thing. What was fun about that scene in the oil tanker was the one I jump in was a real one, and then the moment I jump inside, we’re back in the studio, and we’re shooting in this beautiful set that the crew had built. Shout-out to the crew."
• Mando: "This episode, in a strange way, is Nacho’s lowest and highest point at the same time"
• Mando discusses the "sub textually" of Nacho's speech

Michael Mando's Better Call Saul showcase episode is a reminder why Ignacio "Nacho" Varga was kept around

"The writers of both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are proud to admit how much each show has been made up as it has gone along, and how many aspects of each were happy accidents," says Alan Sepinwall. "Jesse Pinkman was supposed to die within a few episodes of introducing Walter White to the ABQ drug scene, for instance; then Vince Gilligan got to watch Aaron Paul at work. Few characters in either series are more symbolic of that improvisational quality than Nacho Varga. Nacho only exists at all because in Saul Goodman’s first appearance on Breaking Bad, he mentioned the names 'Ignacio' and 'Lalo' to Walt and Jesse when they dragged him out to the desert to scare him. So when they decided many years later to do a Saul prequel series, Gilligan and Peter Gould had to come up with an Ignacio to explain why Saul would name-check him in such a tense moment. The funny thing is, that never quite happened. The initial plan was for Nacho and Jimmy to be frequent antagonists in Season One — but then, the initial plan was also for Jimmy to turn into Saul Goodman before the end of that first year. As the creative team fell in love with Jimmy McGill, Nacho became an early storytelling casualty, disappearing from most of the season’s second half before he and Mike briefly crossed paths in 'Pimento.' But Gould and everyone else liked Michael Mando’s work, for obvious reasons, and they clearly liked having someone on the cartel end of things who didn’t fit neatly into the franchise’s pre-existing archetypes."

ALSO:

• Bob Odenkirk interviews Tony Dalton for Interview magazine
• Between Nacho and Jimmy, this week's Better Call Saul featured two men faced with questions they think they have answers for
• Better Call Saul writer-director Gordon Smith discusses writing and directing this week's episode