Better Call Saul's Michael Mando says he was told: "Brace yourself for a tour de force performance"

Vanity Fair

"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?'"

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• 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