Dean Norris

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Dean Norris is the American actor best known as Hank Schrader on Breaking Bad, whose online meme presence took shape through a viral May 2018 tweet reading just 'Sex gifs' and a two-panel reaction image format that took off in April 2021 using contrasting smiling and displeased photos of him.

Overview

Dean Norris is an American actor best known for playing DEA agent Hank Schrader on Breaking Bad and Big Jim Rennie on Under the Dome7. His online meme footprint has two main pieces: a May 2018 tweet reading only the words 'Sex gifs,' and a two-panel reaction image format built from contrasting photos of him, one grinning and one visibly annoyed7.

The reaction format works like most stacked reaction memes, with the smiling Norris photo on top and the sour-faced Norris photo underneath. He is active on Twitter as @Deanjnorris and picked up a large Breaking Bad fan following there, which helped push his posts into meme circulation2.

How It Spread

The 'Sex gifs' tweet blew up almost immediately, pulling in over 12,000 retweets and 34,000 likes and staying up rather than being quietly deleted1. Most readers assumed Norris had meant to type the phrase into a search engine and hit the tweet box instead, drawing comparisons to former UK politician Ed Balls's 2011 name-tweet5. Twitter users replied with actual sex GIFs, turning the thread itself into part of the joke1.

Coverage picked up quickly from Maxim, AV Club, and Daily Dot, which framed it as a 55-year-old actor getting confused by Twitter's interface156. On Reddit, Norris was already a recurring subject for Breaking Bad fans, with a /r/firstworldanarchists post about him passing 21,000 points3 and a /r/funny post of him cosplaying at Comic-Con reaching 3,600 points4.

In early April 2021, the two-panel reaction format using paired smiling and displeased photos of Norris started circulating, typically used to express approval of one thing next to displeasure at another7. That format kept him in reaction-image rotation alongside his older Breaking Bad screencaps.

How to Use This Meme

For the reaction image, users typically stack the smiling Norris photo above a positive statement and the displeased Norris photo above the thing they dislike, so the punchline lands in the second panel. A common convention is to keep both panels captioned with short text in the same style, following the standard two-panel reaction template7.

Frequently Asked Questions