READ THIS NEXT: She Played Freddie on A Different World. See Cree Summer Now at 52. Gunn got her onscreen start in 1992, with an episode of Quantum Leap and a TV movie called Indecency. From that point on, she began showing up in several popular shows, including Seinfeld, NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope, ER, and Six Feet Under, as well as appearing in films, including Enemy of the State, and providing voices for video game characters. Her biggest pre-Breaking Bad role was playing Martha Bullock, the wife of Timothy Olyphant’s Seth, in the critically celebrated HBO series, Deadwood. After Breaking Bad, Gunn appeared in episodes of The Mindy Project, Criminal Minds, and Prodigal Son. She starred in the American adaptation of the British series Broadchurch, retitled Gracepoint, taking over the role originally played by Olivia Colman. The show only lasted for a season, however. Gunn was a recurring character in Season 2 of the Jennifer Lopez police drama, Shades of Blue, and took on movies including Sully, Being Frank, and The Land of Dreams. Gunn is a theater actor too, and most recently performed in a 2019 West End production of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana.ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb Though she hasn’t reprised Skyler White just yet, Gunn did return to the role of Martha Bullock for the Deadwood movie in 2019, an opportunity that she surely appreciated given that the original run was cut short when the show was canceled. “The creator, David Milch, wanted Deadwood to be a slow burn,” she told The New York Times in 2014. “And unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to let that story really come to fruition. I was the one character in the show who was quite Victorian and proper and buttoned up. And I never got to say any of those really fun swear words. I was so disappointed!” The Breaking Bad star has been married once, to Scottish actor Alastair Neil Duncan, from 1990 to 2009. The couple share two daughters, Eila Rose (15) and Emma (21). Gunn keeps her personal life private, including eschewing any social media accounts. But, you can occasionally spot her kids with her at events. For more celebrity updates sent right to your inbox, sign up for our daily newsletter. Gunn has spoken out several times over the years about the gendered hate that Skyler—and by proxy, Gunn herself—received. In 2013, when the show was still on the air, she wrote a piece for The New York Times titled, “I Have a Character Issue.” While playing Skyler had “been one of the most rewarding creative journeys [she’s] embarked on as an actor,” Gunn wrote, she soon realized that the character was “a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, non-submissive, ill-treated women.” The actor reported that she had received death threats and compared the response to her character to the hate that also targeted characters like Mad Men’s Betty Draper (January Jones) and The Sopranos’ Carmela (Edie Falco). In a 2019 interview with the London Evening Standard, Gunn explained that she felt “compelled to say something, not necessarily for [herself], but for [her] daughters and other women.” “I feel like I came to understand what it was, which was just the undercurrent of extreme sexism. The idea of gender roles being so deeply ingrained—it was shocking to me,” she said. “The vehemence of it, and the fact that it was just allowed—it was the id gone wild.” READ THIS NEXT: She Played Corky on Murphy Brown. See Faith Ford Now at 57.
