A fun thing about old sitcoms is that you’ll often watch it and casually stumble across an actor who’s now probably too famous to play such a minor role. Long before he played the Dean on “Community,” for instance, Jim Rash was freaking out about a plane’s “left phalange” in the “Friends” finale. Before Joseph Gordon-Levitt became a major movie star in the late 2000s, he was on “That ’70s Show” making the moves on Eric Foreman. If you’re looking for the movie stars of tomorrow, you should first look at the minor sitcom roles of today. 

“Seinfeld” was no exception. Jerry, Elaine and George were always dating someone new, which means there was a revolving door of guest stars who’d later become some of the most famous people on TV. This included a lot of “Breaking Bad” stars, like Bob Odenkirk (AKA Saul Goodman) as Elaine’s not-yet-doctor boyfriend in season 8. Perhaps most notable is that both Bryan Cranston (Walter White) and Anna Gunn (Skyler White) both starred in some pretty famous “Seinfeld” episodes. It turns out that before he was selling meth, Bryan Cranston was the world’s worst dentist. And before Skyler was trying to get her husband to stop lying to her, she had to fend off lying accusations from Jerry. 

Both “Breaking Bad” stars made their impact on the “Seinfeld” world, but it was Cranston’s character who stuck around the longest…

Whatley’s a fascinating character, in part because the writers seems to change their minds about him. In his first few appearances in season 6, he’s a relatively normal guy with a bit of a cold streak. He doesn’t seem to like Jerry much, and when he snaps at Jerry for showing up to his party uninvited (Jerry wasn’t sure if he was) you can see a bit of that menacing Heisenberg energy in him. But for the most part, Whatley in his multiple season 6 appearances is a normal guy, more the victim of the gang’s antics than an agent of chaos in his own right. 

Things change, though, in his third appearance near the end of season 6, where it’s implied that he had sex with his dental assistant while Jerry was sedated. It’s also speculated (but not confirmed) that the unconscious Jerry was included in the hook-up somehow. This episode (“The Jimmy”) is the last we see of Whatley until season 8, and it appears that Jerry has either forgiven or forgotten this incident in the time since, because he’s still going to Whatley for all his teeth needs. 

The version of Whatley we get in season 8 is far whackier than his season 6 counterpart. He’s introduced as having recently converted to Judaism, and Jerry suspects that he converted just for the Jewish jokes he’s allowed to say now. Things get crazier when Whatley finds out about Jerry making a joke about dentists, and Whatley tortures him during a dental procedure as revenge. Whatley would appear one final time in season 9 (with “The Strike”), but it’s with his season 8 anger over Jerry’s anti-dentite jokes that he makes his biggest mark on the show. 

Anna Gunn appears as a one-off love interest for Jerry in season 5’s “The Glasses.” George thinks he saw Gunn’s character Amy cheating on Jerry, but his reliability as a witness is in doubt because he was missing his glasses at the time. The result is that Jerry is given a bunch of conflicting bits of evidence that Amy may or may not be cheating on him, and he handles it all in a way that makes him sound insane and paranoid. 

You can see traces of Skyler White in Amy here, mainly in how she’s a normal, straightforward person who has no interest in dating a man who’s got ulterior motives. The fact that Jerry can’t be straight with her, and that he tries to prove her infidelity through indirect and misleading methods, gives Amy the ick. She breaks up with him in her final scene, and we never see her again. Presumably, Amy was so turned off by Jerry that she left New York, changed her name, and married some nerdy chemist-turned-teacher in Albuquerque. 

Talking about her role in “The Glasses” in a 2016 interview, Gunn said, “It was enormous. It was such a huge win, really, for me and it was so exciting and also so nerve-wracking.” She was a largely unknown actress starring in what was one of the biggest shows of its time, so it was a massive deal for her. 

Cranston had similar thoughts. When asked about his recurring “Seinfeld” character in a 2023 interview, he marveled, “The precision in which Jerry and Larry [David] would craft a joke, or a moment, a beat, was just awe-inspiring … And so, no matter who was acting in any scene at any given time, I’m watching brilliance. So even if I only have two scenes in something, I’m watching the rest of the show all through rehearsal, all through taping nights, just to be there to soak it up.”