Bryan Cranston, “Drive”
Famously, this season six episode inspired X-Files writer Vince Gilligan to cast Cranston in a little series he was putting together called Breaking Bad. Though Cranston’s X-Files character, who spends most of the episode riding in a car with Mulder, was a vile bigot, not a megalomaniacal meth maker, there are similarities—not the least of which being Cranston’s ability to make both men people you want to root for in spite of everything. “You don’t have to like him. But you need to sympathize and feel empathy and sorrow for him at the end of the hour,” Gilligan told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011.
