CRANSTON IN THE MIDDLE
Actor found himself in social media’s crosshairs over recent remarks
Bryan Cranston walks into the room. He’s tall, warm, unstarry, with a head that could have been looted from an unfinished statue — rough-hewed, monumental. This is the man who took us to unimaginable places when playing one of the greatest television characters of all time, Walter White in the drama series Breaking Bad.
Cranston became the news toward the end of last year when he was asked by the BBC about the sex scandal engulfing Hollywood, and was quoted as saying there could be a way back for Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey if they show they are “truly sorry” for their actions. His response sparked editorials at home and abroad labelling him “part of the problem.”
He feels his remarks were taken out of context, and that he had spoken about the levels of contrition that would be necessary for these men — “to show they ’ve truly worked on themselves, not gone to a country club place in Arizona or Utah, ridden horses and gone, ‘I feel better’ ... it takes years.”
Is forgiveness a possibility? “Well, yes, I think, if we’re honest, it is a possibility ... not now, it’s such a hot button thing ... ( but) in all the great religions of the world forgiveness is a part of that belief system.”
In the case of Spacey, though, he feels that “the egregious nature of what he’s done is going to end his career.”
With hindsight, the course of Cranston’s life might have seemed set from the moment his parents met in an acting class in Los Angeles.
His father was a brawler, a bitpart actor in B movies and television shows, and a dreamer-up of business schemes. When Cranston was 11, his father walked out; the bank repossessed their house, and Cranston and his brother were sent to live on his grandparents’ farm. He didn’t see his father again for a decade. His mother became bitter, had “scores of boyfriends, and several husbands” and became an alcoholic, while his father’s failures continued to mount — he made a habit of contacting Cranston asking for ever-increasing loans.
Cranston took the hard route to the top, recording commercials and bit parts, before settling into well-paid celebrity in his 40s as Hal in the popular sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. He was already 50 by the time he was cast in Breaking Bad.
Cranston gave the character a deep humanity, inspiring pity for him even as he became a drug lord and murderer. In return, Breaking Bad, which debuted in 2008, brought its star opportunities that he “couldn’t have imagined,” opening the door to parts in Oscar-winning films such as Argo, blockbusters such as Godzilla, and heavyweight stage roles such as Lyndon B. Johnson in the 2014 Broadway production of All the Way, for which he won a Tony award.
We come back to Weinstein. He was an investor on All the Way, while Cranston had a similar role on Weinstein’s 2016 Broadway flop Finding Neverland (with music by Gary Barlow). Weinstein asked him to appear in his last film before the scandal broke, the still unreleased The Upside, alongside Kevin Hart and Nicole Kidman.
“Yeah, I’ve known Harvey for about five years now,” says Cranston. “I liked him. I did. He was always very kind to my wife, always knew her name, always embraced her. He was an aggressive businessman, who cared passionately about the movies. I did hear that he was a womanizer. I was like, ‘OK, does that mean he cheats on his wife? Oh, well that’s unfortunate, but it’s none of my business.’ And then all this happens and I realized I didn’t know him at all. All I saw was the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t know the well of damage that this man was capable of.
“There are some people who were saying, in Hollywood everyone knew exactly who he was. I didn’t know, I’ll take a lie detector right now. I had no idea what he was doing.” An even bigger surprise, says Cranston, was learning about the allegations involving comedian Louis C.K., with whom he had worked on Trumbo, the 2015 film for which Cranston received his first Oscar nomination.
I ask him about a passage in his 2016 autobiography, A Life in Parts, in which he describes a coercive relationship he had in his 20s with a woman who would leave messages on his answering machine saying she would have him killed. He describes himself squeezed into a ball, rocking, overtaken by fear, as she screamed and kicked the door outside his locked apartment.
“I hesitate to say that I understand how (women) feel because I had that one experience, and women face this all the time, or young men in the company of older, stronger, more powerful men. But I kind of had a similar experience. I was bullied by her, I was frightened of her, and I was embarrassed about that.”
He imagined himself killing her. “Oh, thank God I didn’t do that,” he wrote in his memoir, but the shock of the experience “broke a fever dream for me.” The dread and anger he felt have come into play in other ways, however.
“When Walter White sees red and gets furious and feels like he’s enraged and he could kill someone, I’ve got that. I can tap into that.”