Season finales don’t get much more explosive than the sophomore year-ender of AMC’s hit show, Breaking Bad. Of course, I could be referring to the airplane collision over the house of secretive drug kingpin Walter White (Emmy winner Bryan Cranston), or the confrontation between him and his Skyler (Anna Gunn) that caused her to leave him because of his many lies. Sunday night, the third season premieres with Walt having to figure out what to do about his crumbling family and his increasing power in the New Mexico drug community. But Gunn says there’s interesting stuff in the works for Skyler, too. I talked with the actress for a Who’s News item in the magazine this weekend, and she dished all about the upcoming season — or at least what she could say without ruining too much. Read below for our conversation.

Photos courtesy of AMC

What can you say about Skyler’s role in the upcoming season?
In a way, this season is the chickens coming home to roost for Walt, and so much of that obviously has to do with Skyler. Where the audience is left at the end of season two, she doesn’t know exactly what it is he’s been doing, but she knows it cannot be something on the up-and-up, probably criminal. This season, they start to explore a lot more of what she does with the information she finds out and how she reacts to it, so there’s a lot more character development for her this year, which has been a lot of fun. It’s the season where Skyler really starts to find her own footing and starts to find her own strength. It also feels to me that it’s the season she starts to find her own voice as well, which I like.

That kind of character has become more and more popular on TV, like on Dexter and Big Love: The person who doesn’t really know all of the secrets that are going on, but as a viewer, you watch as she understands more and more.
It’s interesting when that is used, that the audience knows more than a particular character. You’re on pins and needles in a way. You’re going, “When is she going to find out, oh my God!” And in a way, Skyler sometimes is the audience, because of what she finds out and how she finds things out along the way. There’s an alignment sometimes with the audience. We’re going to start to glimpse into her work world a little bit more, as she’s gone back to work with Ted Beneke [played by Christopher Cousins] and that sort of thing. She really starts to branch out as a human being.

Does creator Vince Gilligan talk with you about your character? Did you ask him to branch her out a little bit?
That was definitely Vince and the writers’ plan this year: to find out a little bit more about Skyler and to find out how she’s going to deal with what she does find out. There are times when the family specifically is seen so much through Walt’s eyes, and I was really happy that they branched out Skyler a little bit more so you actually saw her not just always in relief to Walt, but actually on her own as an individual. I thought that was really important, and I was happy that they started to do more of that.

Prior to Breaking Bad, you had been on HBO’s Deadwood for a number of episodes. It seems cable programs have a lot more creative freedom than a network show. Do you work better in that “anything goes” mold of cable?
I think so. It really appeals to me because both [Deadwood creator] David Milch and Vince Gilligan are some of the best writers I’ve ever worked with in my career. So when they’re given the freedom to write the story they want to write in the way they want to write it, and develop the characters the way they want to do it, it’s a pretty exhilarating environment when you have minds like that working. Because there is so much creative freedom, obviously wonderfully brilliant things come out of that. There was a freedom on HBO that you got because it was a pay cable channel, and there simply weren’t the strictures of having to meet censorship things. But both networks give absolute freedom to the creators and the writers, and I think it’s an important thing in terms of a working environment. It really trickles down to all of us.

You may have filmed it already, but will there ever be that one scene where it all goes down and there’s that ultimate face-off between Walt and Skyler?
I’m not going to say specifically what it is, but they face off throughout the entire season. [Laughs] There’s a lot of the two of them standing eye to eye, and I likened it at one point to a game of poker: What does the other person know? You’re looking at the other person trying to get their tell or their tic, trying to see if they’re really telling the truth or not. And the same goes with Walt looking at Skyler: What does she know, what does she not know? There are lots of face-offs between them. It’s pretty juicy.