The comedian referenced the main character of “Breaking Bad,” which was played by Bryan Cranston, in an interview with TMZ.

Chris Redd elaborates on saying he sold pills to SNL costars: ‘I wasn’t Walter White-ing it’

The comedian referenced the main character of "Breaking Bad," which was played by Bryan Cranston, in an interview with TMZ.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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January 16, 2026 4:02 p.m. ET

Chris Redd appears on 'Saturday Night Live'; Bryan Cranston plays Walter White on 'Breaking Bad'. Credit:

Kyle Dubiel/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty; AMC

Chris Redd says he has no place on TV's *Breaking Bad*.

In a new interview with TMZ, the former *Saturday Night Live* cast member explained that, when he said in a Jan. 6 social media video that he had sold pills to his costars, he didn't mean he was a drug dealer.**

"I was being facetious about the drug-dealing thing," Redd said Wednesday when a cameraman for the outlet approached him on a New York City street. "I wasn’t drug dealing to my castmates. I wasn’t dropping off a pack. I wasn’t Walter White-ing. I was trying, I was wondering things... trying to make light of it, because I was feeling super vulnerable and raw at the time."

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The White reference was, of course, a nod to the character Bryan Cranston played on Vince Gilligan's AMC crime drama *Breaking Bad *over five seasons, from 2008 to 2013. The Emmy-winning series depicted White, a chemistry teacher facing terminal cancer, turning to manufacturing and selling drugs in order to secure his family's financial future.

Redd, who was a cast member from 2017 to 2022, insisted that he had not been selling drugs.

Chris Redd photographed in 2023.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty

"No, I was not selling," said the comedian, who acknowledged that he was on Adderall and Xanax that weren't prescribed to him. "I had a full-time job as a comic."

But Redd noted that he had been afraid to go to the doctor, whom he thought would "say I was crazy."

He also (correctly) pointed out that *Saturday Night Live* has a long history of illegal substances.

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"The drug issue at *SNL* was there before I was there, and I had nothing to do with that," Redd noted. "I just kind of worded it the way I worded it. I didn’t think [anybody] was really going to take it serious, because I wasn't really in that way. And there are so many other things I was talking about."

Redd made comments about "selling [pills] some to people, to some of my castmates" in a Jan. 6 video that he posted to social media about his previous "pill problems."

Redd currently appears in the movie *Merv*, which is available to stream on Prime Video.**

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