RJ Mitte, disability activist and actor best known for playing Walter White Jr. in the hit series Breaking Bad, has died. He was 34.
A representative for Mitte confirmed the death to Variety and Deadline. However, the cause of death was not disclosed.
Mitte played the son of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White on the Emmy-winning series before becoming a disability-rights activist after living with cerebral palsy since the age of three.
Mitte moved to Los Angeles as a teenager and quickly booked a role on Breaking Bad at 13.
“I was just doing extra work and acting classes … and about six months later, I booked Breaking Bad,” Mitte said in a 2016 interview with VICE. “The breakdown for the character was dark hair, big eyebrows, and mild cerebral palsy – that was my life, except for the methamphetamine.”
Mitte said he didn’t know at the time, but his character was based on a real person that Vince Gilligan, the creator and writer of Breaking Bad, knew in college.
“I think it’s really important that we have real stories on television and film that are having real impact,” Mitte said.
“People are hungry for realism. They’re hungry to see characters like them, and I think that’s what was really important with Breaking Bad. It showed characters that everyone can relate to.”
Brain-damaged at birth, Mitte needed leg braces and had to learn to control his limbs as a child but went on to play soccer with his mum yelling “run, Forrest, run” from the sideline, he said in a 2019 interview with this masthead.
Mitte, who came for the Sydney Film Festival for a screening of the Australian romantic comedy Standing Up For Sunny in which he appeared alongside My Brilliant Career star Phillipa Northeast, also said he realised he’d always be known as the kid from Breaking Bad.
“Yeah man, that’s going to follow me till the day I die,” he said. “And that’s not a bad thing. Breaking Bad was a very special show.”
In Standing Up For Sunny, Mitte plays a comic who shares a house in Sydney’s inner west with a blind musician (Italia Hunt) and falls for a bartender with bulimia (Northeast) whom he coaches in stand-up comedy.
Mitte, who also starred in 2021 sports drama Triumph about a teenager with cerebral palsy, spent much of his childhood in physical, occupational and speech therapy.
“I was what you would call a severe toe walker,” he told VICE in the 2016 interview.
“What they would do is they would bend my foot as far as they could bend it, which was not fun, and they would cast it. Every couple of weeks, I would cut the cast off and bend it further, and then bend it further until the foot was flat. I’m always working at taking control. It’s a fight. It will always be a fight.”
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