BREAKING MAD
Thad a tough road when it came to recovering from the traumatic brain injury he suffered in a 2014 highway accident: he had to regain his memory, he had to learn to walk again. He had to go without sex. “That was the hard part!” he exclaims. “Oh my God! My wife, she’s pregnant with triplets right now! My sperm came out wearing a cape!” He must have felt like a born-again virgin when it was time to get back down to business, we noted. “Oh yeah – I even took my wife to my old high school and had her in the staircase,” he joked. At least we think he was joking. Either way, Morgan is back in action, with a new Netflix special, “Tracy Morgan: Staying Alive.” In the show he riffs about the road back after the accident, in which a Walmart truck struck the limo he and a few other comics were riding in, killing his friend and putting Morgan into an eight-day coma. The Brooklyn native is also set to star in a new comedy series created by for TBS, about a convict who comes back to a gentrified Brooklyn after a 15-year prison bit.
Was the comedy special a hard project to work on, given the trauma he was revisiting?
“No!” he exclaims. “Because I’d done with it. I’d done crying about it.”
A moment later, Morgan allowed that he’s still struggling, and “crying in my heart for Jimmy.” “I still get depressed, I still get upset. I still go through stuff. But I can’t sit around thinking about it. I got a young daughter, I got a wife, I got sons. I got a life! That’s not my world, that’s not my life. I ain’t gonna give Walmart that much!”
And he said, he has a powerful ally: “The good will and the love out there in the world for me. I feel it every day now. The most important thing for me is just to give it back.” In “Wakefield,” character suffers a nervous breakdown, which reminded the 61-year-old star of the “murderous” feeling he’s written about having harbored toward his real life ex-lover 33 years ago. “That experience helped me realize and accept that anybody can become dangerous, which was the basis for forming (his legendary ‘Breaking Bad’ character) Walter White,” Cranston said at a Fiji Water-sponsored screening. “Why could that man, a milquetoast kind of guy, how could he become dangerous? All I had to do was go, ‘I know how.’”