Breaking Bad: 10 Best Characters Who Appeared After Season One
8. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Lydia Rodarte-Quayle is just how little we know about her. She’s involved in the meth distribution business at the highest level, and has absolutely no qualms when it comes to sentencing her enemies, or simply obstacles in her way, to death. We’re given nary a sense as to how she got here, nor really what she gets out of it.
Unlike Gus, she has no prior scores to settle. Unlike Walter, she has no interest in accruing a reputation, for being known as a ruthless drug lord. Indeed in a world of larger than life figures, she feels far more down to earth. She’s a multimillionaire meth pusher, but she’s unable to relax into that lifestyle. She’s a bag of nerves at all times, forever aware that what she’s doing could well have terrible consequences.
She personifies capitalism run amok even more than Gustavo Fring, and is all the less sympathetic for it. Even her young daughter, for whom she evidently cares deeply, can’t humanise her. Laura Fraser’s icy but jittery performance brilliantly sells this irreparably damaged person.