If you happen to look like a pop culture icon, you might as well embrace it.
That’s the attitude of Bill Laird, a bus driver who bears a striking resemblance to Walter White a.k.a Heisenberg, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, the wildly popular TV series about a high school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin.
“When I first walked in, I was like, damn, this guy’s Heisenberg, right?” said one passenger on the 135 bus that serves Simon Fraser University.
There’s long been a resemblance between Laird and the character portrayed by actor Bryan Cranston, but the complete transformation happened by accident. Last September, Laird wanted a new look so he grew a goatee, put on some ‘Just for Men’ and went to work.
His colleagues were stunned.
“He came in one day and I said, ‘My God, you look like Heisenberg.’ And he really didn’t think he looked like Heisenberg until he started looking at the pictures,” said colleague Robert Ferguson.
Someone posted a photo of Laird online, and the image soon popped up on social media.
“My son called me up and apparently he saw a picture of me in the London Sun,” Laird said. “I think the header for it was, ‘Is my braking bad?'”
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He may look like Walter White, but in reality Laird is nothing like the anti-hero who once proclaimed, “I am not in danger. I am the danger.”
The school paper named him “SFU’s nicest bus driver.”
If Breaking Bad ever returns and Bryan Cranston needs a stand-in, Laird would be happy to oblige. But until then, he’s just happy being the star of the 135 bus.
“I really do love my job,” he said.
– With files from Jordan Armstrong
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