Trumbo finds dark humour
Breaking Bad star revels in ‘flamboyant’ role as banned writer
Bryan Cranston will be on the Academy Awards short list for best actor, and Trumbo for best screenplay.
You heard it here first. The 59-year-old, best known as Walter White in six seasons of Breaking Bad, has found a new, meaty role as Dalton Trumbo, a Hollywood screenwriter who was blacklisted and jailed during the post-war Communist scare in Hollywood.
Trumbo was a larger-than-life character, something Cranston found appealing in the role. “He’s such a flamboyant guy,” the actor says. “It’s so theatrical. He has a sizeable ego, so he can pontificate.” He switches into Trumbo’s voice: “Listen to my glorious words!”
And yet playing a real person brings a sense of responsibility, he notes.
Trumbo died in 1976, but Cranston has also played U.S. president Lyndon Johnson on the stage and astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
“I want to get this right,” he remembers thinking of the Aldrin role, “because people are going to be watching this who know him and who ARE him.”
So Cranston sought out Trumbo’s two surviving children.
“His relationship with his daughters, there’s a strained sense there.
“They feared him, he was curious to them, they challenged him, especially Nicky.” The outspoken Nikola Trumbo is played by Elle Fanning.
“They called him Trumbo,” Cranston says. “That was indicative to me. It says something, that there was a little bit of a distance
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between them, instead of ‘Daddy.’ ”
Cranston also talked to Dustin Hoffman, who knew the man through the film Papillon, which Trumbo co-wrote and also acted in, uncredited, as a French prison commandant.
(At this point, Cranston launches into an impression of Trumbo doing a French accent.)
“You keep picking until your bushel is filled and then you go do it,” he says. Actors fuse personal experience with the results of their research. “And the last is your imagination, to connect the pieces.”
The result is an informative, tragic and yet oddly funny story. Directed by Jay Roach (the Austin Powers trilogy, Meet the Parents and its sequel), Trumbo features such proven comic talents as Louis C.K., John Goodman and Stephen Root.
It’s not a laugh-a-minute story: Thanks to the blacklist, Trumbo could not claim credit for his Oscar-winning screenplays for Roman Holiday and The Brave One, and he was driven into poverty and spent 11 months in prison.
But it manages to poke fun at the times without crossing the line into disrespect.
“We do find levity in some more serious moments,” Cranston says. “You go, ‘If this weren’t so serious this would be funny.’ And when time erases the level of seriousness, you do find it funny.”
Trumbo wasn’t the only Hollywood figure to face jail time and financial ruin because of the blacklist, and Cranston points out that it wasn’t Communist beliefs that resulted in his prison term: Trumbo was deemed to be in contempt of Congress for failing to answer questions or name names when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“They went to jail not because they committed a crime but because they didn’t respond inthe way the committee wanted themto.”
So after the laughter dies down, Cranston says, there’s an important message in the film as well.