Meet "the Spooges" from "Breaking Bad," and hear for once about loathsome degenerates who have nothing to do with politics or gummint

From the Breaking Bad Season 2 episode "Breakage": David Ury as Spooge (we learned his name in the next episode) and Dale Dickey as "Spooge's Woman" (we never did learn her name). AMC has posted a great interview in which Dale and David talk about what it's like to play this kind of role -- not surprisingly, it turns out to be mostly what they're hired to do -- and to play these roles in particular.

"It's great to roll out of bed and go to auditions and not have to look nice. That's the plus side."

-- actress Dale Dickey

by Ken

I was all set to write about yet another demonstration of the homicidal sociopathy and stinking hypocrisy of the 21st-Century Right, this time in connection with shocking (!) evidence that the lapse in the limited assault-weapons ban has led to -- can you imagine it? -- increased deaths from assault weapons! Man oh man, who could have foreseen that? But that subject, I'm afraid, will still be there tomorrow, or any subsequent time I'm moved to return to it, and meanwhile something came up.

As I've already written, I've been enjoying the heck out of AMC's Wednesday late-night re-airing (two episodes per week) of the complete first three seasons of Breaking Bad. At first I was catching up with episodes I had never seen, but for some time now we've been into episodes I had seen, and can now view with much fuller understanding and appreciation, not to mention the sheer pleasure of simply seeing them again.

Nice as it is to log two episodes a week on the DVR, I tend to husband them, because after all, once I've zipped through them, I have none till next week. At the moment I've still got last week's episodes stored on the DVR. I was reminded today that I'm suspended between two crucial ones, Nos. 5 and 6 of Season 2, when I got the latest AMC Breaking Bad e-newsletter linking to a Q&A with actors who play crucial roles in these episodes.

During this Breaking Bad rebroadcast, the show's Web page has been spotlighting the supporting actors who've contributed so much to its tremendous impact. Having myself spent a fair amount of time among theater folk, I'm reflexively on the side of these people, with their considerable talents and skills. (And their present-day ever-more-troubled employability. In case you didn't know, these are horrific times for actors. Not for the superstars, but for the people who do the real work of making plays and movies and TV shows worth watching, and these days are increasingly scrounging for any work they can find at the piddling rates exploitative producers can get away with paying.)

The last episode I watched, "Breakage," included the scene in which a pair of degenerate meth addicts rob Skinny Pete (Charles Baker), one of the sad-sack friends Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) has recruited as street dealers for the meth produced by his onetime high school chemistry teacher and current meth-cooking partner, Walter White (Bryan Cranston). Walter didn't react well to this glitch in their distribution and, though he's supposed to be involved solely in production, berated Jess for fostering a popular impression that they're pushovers. By the end of "Breakage," Walter was leaning heavily on Jesse to do something about it, and gave him a gun for the purpose.

What Jesse does becomes one of the major subjects of the next episode, "Peekaboo." That's the first of the two episodes I have waiting on my DVR, as I was reminded by the interview with David Ury and Dale Dickey, who play the meth addicts, Spooge and "Spooge's Woman" (she never did have a name). I confess that as I watched these episodes originally, when it came to actors merging themselves so wholly with characters this hopelessly degenerate and loathsome, I really didn't take much notice of them as actors, not even pausing to reflect that, since they're obviously hired first of all for their "look," this is the kind of work they tend to get. Nor did I reflect that, however effective a look they're able to bring to such parts, it takes pretty impressive acting skills to create the characters so memorably that one barely notices the actors.

I found their interview utterly delightful, and that much more so for the credit it reflects on the similarly underheralded behind-the-camera people who do such good work on shows like Breaking Bad. The makeup people, for example:

Q: Let's talk about the makeup. It seemed so integral to who these people are.
DAVID: I remember the first day in "Breakage" we were in downtown Albuquerque, and I came out of the makeup trailer and was walking across the parking lot and the set security guard said, "Sir, you cannot be in here." That's when I knew the makeup folks had done their job.
DALE: Like it was the real thing! Boy, they did the job well. I remember turning to one of the producers, trying to ask a question, and there were visitors to the set and their faces were just horrified.
DAVID: It looked worse, I think, close-up. There were always reactions, all day long.
DALE: "Oh, the Spooges are coming!"

Then there were the set design and dressing teams, who for "Peekaboo" had to create the hovel in which "the Spooges" (if you can imagine, it gets even more horrible -- we discover that these people have a child!) lived.

Q: Are you better housekeepers than the Spooges?
DALE: Ohmygod!
DAVID: I think I'm marginally better.
DALE: I have boxes I need to go through, but nothing compared to that house. After a while it was just like, "I don't want to touch anything in here if I can't wash my hands."
Q: Any items in the mess that stood out to you?
DALE: There was a bra with a lot of empty cigarette butts that set dressing had out that I thought was pretty special.
DAVID: There were cigarette butts everywhere.
DALE: And that couch! That big nasty couch had something written repeatedly on the armrest. Sort of like, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." It was something from one of the crazy people that lived there. It put me right in the mood -- somebody's been sitting here desperately writing to get out of this place.
Q: Did you keep any souvenirs?
DAVID [laughs]: Just the memories.
DALE: I remember that prop ashtray, 'cause didn't I hit you in the head with that? I'm sorry. I know I hit you more than once.
DAVID: I got hit in the shin by something, but I think that was something with Aaron [Paul, who plays Jesse].
DALE [singing]: Memories...

Of course what we really want to hear Dale and David talk about is the roles themselves, and their work as actors.

Q: Is there anything you actually liked about these despicable characters?
DAVID: That's pretty much all I play. (I somehow got a clean-cut role on a Disney kid's show.) He's a little more hard-core than my usual meth-addict role, but that's my bread-and-butter.
DALE: When I see a character like that on a breakdown, it's like, "Oh, that's a Dale role!" I too play a lot of those.
DAVID: We were meant to be, really.
DALE: Some of the freedoms that can be found in those really intense characters are a lot of fun. It's such a dark, dark place to go. But it's great to roll out of bed and go to auditions and not have to look nice. That's the real plus side.
DAVID: I'll say this: There was something about the writing for Spooge that set him aside from some of the other druggie characters I've played, which is that he seemed to have had a life as a non-meth-head, because he knew these terms like "subdural hematoma." Maybe he was an EMT at one point who dug into the morphine or something. . . .

Q [to DAVID]: You're more of a gentleman than your character.
DAVID: I think that could be said of about 99.5 percent of the male population, but yes, I hope. I try to open doors for the ladies.
DALE: I'm sorry I dropped that ATM on your head. Can we just go back and redo that? Can we please?
DAVID: Looking back, this was all just a big misunderstanding. And had I used some of the communication tools that our counselor had suggested, I think we could have -- I take the blame for it, but really I think it was just a miscommunication.
Q: About that: Why do you think Spooge's Woman takes such offense at being called a skank?
DALE: Most addicts, deep down, have a huge sense of shame and guilt about how skanky they can be. I think she knows she's a skank. She just doesn't want to hear it over and over and over again, particularly from him -- cause he's a skank too.
Q: She has such a wicked laugh when they're stealing the meth from Skinny Pete. Where did that come from?
DALE: I just knew that it needed to be something extreme and different from the way I laugh, so I just went for it. That whole evening was physically intense because I was in some spiky heel boots and really tight jeans running down that alleyway to get the take, and I was still smoking at that time so I was hurtin'. By the time we got to that next section where we were inside, the laugh was maybe relief.

Naturally Dale and David eventually talk about their climactic scene in the "Breakage" episode.

Q: David, how does getting killed by an ATM machine compare with your other on-screen deaths?
DAVID: That's definitely one of the more creative deaths that will likely not be repeated. Elizabeth Berkley shot me, which was really rude. A monster throttled me against a door and then pulled out my guts.
DALE: Oh nice. Yeah, I had one of those. Fun.
DAVID: A demon did something similar where he reached inside and pulled out my insides. My earliest one and only experience in high school theater was in a play about a fisherman who goes off to sea in Ireland and dies. I had two lines and then I was dead onstage for the rest of the play. That was foreshadowing my career. I don't think that character was written as a meth addict, but I probably played it that anyway. . . .

Q: Was it hard to do the scene where the ATM falls on Spooge's head?
DAVID: You don't realize that when you are performing for a TV show you have to do all that acting stuff but at the same time you have to be thinking, okay, when she says this, that's my cue to stick my neck under the floorboard so the ATM can fall on me. The other thing was having a live drill. I was afraid that I was going to somehow slip and drill a hole in poor Dale. And definitely, when I came out and I saw that setup, I was like, "Ohmygod, we have to do this?"
DALE: It just made you queasy.
DAVID: It scared the hell out of me, which is probably very good for the adrenaline that I needed to play that.
DALE: Listen, before that episode aired, I was in my kitchen with my husband, and I didn't want to spoil the episode for him so I hadn't told him about the ATM machine. Something was wrong with our refrigerator and he leaned it back against a chair and asked me to hold it while he got underneath it. It freaked me out. I was like, "No, I can't do it." He was like, "What's wrong with you? Just hold the fridge." It was a flashback to the ATM.
DAVID: Post-traumatic stress disorder.

There's more to the interview, including discussion of David's video entry into AMC's "You Could Be on Mad Men contest, in which he played the Jon Hamm character, Don Draper, "a character that i would never get to play." He explains: "Instead of basing it on who Don Draper was, I was just doing it the way I do things," and the interviewer ventures, "It's a little like watching Spooge do Don Draper." David didn't win the contest, and suggests that it wouldn't have looked right if an actor who'd just done a guest shot on another AMC series won. "That's the only possible reason I could have lost, of course."


MORE ABOUT DALE AND DAVID . . .

Dale doesn't have a bio with her IMDb entry, just "Trivia": "Graduated from Bearden High School in Knoxville. Later attended the University of Tennessee." and "Was once bitten by a copperhead snake."

However, David has a full-fledged "mini-biography" with his IMDb entry. He doesn't seem to have a lot in common with Spooge and the other characters he plays.

David Ury

Height
5' 10" (1.78 m)

Mini Biography
David Ury was raised in Sonoma, California and began his acting career on Japanese television as the "zany Japanese speaking foreigner". David learned to speak Japaense fluently while at college in Tokyo and currently translates and writes English adaptations for Japanese comics (manga). David moved to Los Angeles in August of 2001 where he began performing improv and stand up comedy. In the spring of 2003 David became known as the "Ugly Guy" from the Fox Mr. Personality promo commercials. More recently he's become known as the "guy who says yes" on the Internet viral verizon parody short.

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