RJ Mitte
RJ Mitte is an actor, born 1992.
Diagnosed with cerebral palsy at three and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, RJ Mitte moved to Hollywood in 2006 and went looking for work with a specific condition attached: he wanted roles where his disability would teach the audience something rather than be quietly written around. That is an unusual brief for a teenager, and it shaped everything that followed.
After minor sitcom parts he was cast as Walter White Jr. on Breaking Bad, a role that ran from 2008 to 2013 and shared in the show's Screen Actors Guild award for its drama ensemble. The part is easy to underrate. Walt Jr. is the one person in the series who is never let in on anything, and the show uses him as a moral instrument: every scene he appears in measures the distance between what his father is doing and what his father is pretending to be. Mitte plays him without a hint of appeal to the audience, and the character's cerebral palsy is simply present rather than being the point of him, which at the time was close to unheard of on American television.
Since then the work has been smaller and patchier. He played Campbell Bingman on Switched at Birth, took leads in the low-budget features The Recall and River Runs Red, appeared in Now Apocalypse and This Close, and produces as well as acts. The advocacy has stayed constant throughout. This is a career where the most interesting line is not the filmography.
Movies (4)
TV (5)
Where to start with RJ Mitte
Nothing on this list competes with Breaking Bad, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Watch it for its own sake, then pay attention to how the series deploys Walt Jr.: he is almost always the last person in the room to know anything, and Mitte's job is to be completely, uncomfortably sincere while everyone around him lies. The breakfast scenes are the running joke and also the tragedy.
Beyond that, Switched at Birth is the best use of him outside Albuquerque, a family drama that treats disability and deafness as lived experience rather than as plot mechanism. This Close works the same ground and is worth an hour of anyone's time.
The Recall and River Runs Red are small genre films that will interest completists only, and No Half Measures: Creating the Final Season of Breaking Bad is the making-of, useful if you want to hear him talk about the job.