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Is Bryan Cranston Hollywood’s nicest man?
Guy Kelly finds out
‘I don’t expect special treatment. I’m just a working actor who’s grateful’
Despite not finding fame until his mid-50s, he is now a Hollywood elder statesman. As he makes his TV return in Sky’s new thriller, Bryan Cranston talks to Guy Kelly about his fractured family, the couples’ counselling that keeps his marriage on track, and his A-list bromance. Photography by Norman Jean Roy
With nowhere to go, little to do, and varying grasps on the real world, Hollywood’s great and good have found their own ways to pass the time over lockdown. Some took to political activism; a benign group recorded a legendarily embarrassing John Lennon cover; others went slowly insane. But Bryan Cranston, ever the Everyman, simply did what we all did: he got really into baking.
‘Sourdough bread!’ he says, of course. ‘I’m looking to expand to other things I’m curious about, but there’s something very soothing about following a specific recipe. In my acting life I’m calling the shots at any given moment, but following a recipe is like, “Oh, add a quarter cup of sugar, OK.” There’s something peaceful about it.’
Fans of Breaking Bad, the fêted AMC crime drama that ran from 2008 to 2013, vaulting Cranston from industrious character actor to international leading man in his mid-50s, and winning him six Emmys along the way, will know he’s a dab hand with measurements and conical flasks. After all, Walter White, his drug-lord character, started as a chemistry teacher. But whether Cranston’s sourdough is up to much may require a second opinion. Thanks to a bout of Covid-19 last March, the baker himself still hasn’t fully recovered his sense of taste.
‘It’s come back to some degree, but not 100 per cent,’ Cranston, 65, says. He and his wife of 31 years, Robin Dearden, were ‘very lucky’, and mainly had aches and pains, plus a slight cough, for a few days. They caught it two weeks after their friends, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, went down with the same thing in Australia. ‘Tom got it just before I did. When he came out with it I think it was very fortunate for society that, “Oh, a rich and famous guy can get it? Then that means I can get it.” So it really hit home for a lot of people.
‘I bristle when I hear people saying it’s too big a sacrifice to wear a mask and socially distance. I’m thinking, “Is that really a sacrifice?” Your grandparents, my parents, were in World War Two, that was a sacrifice. This is an inconvenience. Just buck up, wear the mask, do what we’re told by the experts, and we can overcome this.’
Today, Cranston is looking hale and hearty, at the home he shares with Dearden, 67, in Los Angeles. He’s in a black hoodie and grey T-shirt. Hanging on the wall behind him is a quadriptych depicting a dark landscape (‘My wife bought it, I don’t know who it is…’), and hanging on his face is the most magnificent greying beard. The hair has turned fluffy and slightly ashen, too.
Cranston is here, on my laptop, to talk about his grand return to all our small screens, in Sky Atlantic’s gripping 10-part thriller Your Honor. It is a series with a simple but snaring elevator pitch: he plays Michael Desiato, an upstanding New Orleans judge whose teenage son, Adam, kills another young man in a hit and run. Desiato is insistent that he and Adam must go to the police station. When they get there, however, he discovers that the deceased boy’s father is the city’s most notorious crime boss, who is so hell-bent on revenge that Adam would almost certainly be killed if he confessed.
‘It’s a beautiful dilemma to present to an audience,’ Cranston says. That moral conundrum – would you turn your child in? – caused long debates among the cast, crew, Cranston’s friends, and just about anyone to whom he mentioned it.
When they’d settled on an answer (usually, ‘No, I’d protect my kid and cover it up’), he’d throw in the same spanner Your Honor does: but what if covering up your child’s crime meant another, entirely innocent person was killed in revenge as a further consequence?
‘All of a sudden the dynamic shifts, and they go, “Oh God no, I can’t…” And they’re engrossed in this hypothetical situation. And that’s exactly where you want drama to live.’
So what would Cranston do? His daughter, Taylor, is 28 and has her own life as an actor (she was a lead in Netflix’s true-crime satire American Vandal), but he’s thought about it. He’d do anything for her, however…
‘I don’t know, I certainly wouldn’t make a decision that would put someone innocent in danger. I’d have to figure something else out.’
A little over half of Your Honor was completed before the pandemic, meaning Cranston could invest time getting to know his costars. He asked British actor Carmen Ejogo, who plays his on-screen love interest, ‘on a date’ as soon as they were cast, and had dinners with Hunter Doohan, who plays Adam, before a shot was filmed. But none of that was possible when they returned to complete the series in the autumn.
‘I was tested three times a week,’ says Cranston, who wasn’t filming when he caught Covid last year. ‘The working conditions were very strange. We had to wear masks even when we were rehearsing. Standing 6ft apart, then all of a sudden, when we’re ready to shoot, Carmen and I are nose-tonose. Then cut, step back, put the masks back on. No dinners; go to work, go home. Quite frankly, a lot of the fun was taken out of the whole process.’
It seems only right that Cranston, who has a reputation as one of Hollywood’s good guys, is such firm friends with ‘America’s dad’, Hanks. ‘[He] doesn’t need anything from me, I don’t need anything from him,’ is how he has summed up their ease with one another. They share the same neighbourover-the-fence affability, the immaculately honed talk-show anecdotes, the willingness to send themselves up, and dole out calm, paternal counsel like business cards. He’s a
deputy Hanks. The vice-hanks, if you will, only a little less sugary.
But although Cranston has played well over three dozen fathers in his time – including White and his biggest role before that, as the chaotic dad, Hal, in Malcolm in the Middle – as well as bringing up Taylor, it hasn’t taught him much.
‘Do you have children, Guy?’ he asks, mistily. I do not, so he proceeds. ‘They’re just people. It comes without an instruction manual. Will you make mistakes? You absolutely will.
You just have to learn by that and accept your frailties, and apologise to your children for putting them in that position.’
For Cranston, life is a constant process of self-reflection and improvement. He does press-ups, sit-ups, and jogs most days. ‘Demons fly out of my ass,’ he’s said of running. ‘It releases endorphins and it releases tensions, and I need it.’
Another thing he has in common with Hanks is that they both married young and divorced young – aged 21, Cranston wed writer Mickey Middleton in 1977, but divorced after five years, later saying that he ‘wasn’t ready’ – before settling down with women they’ve now been with for over three decades.
Cranston met Dearden in
1984, when he held her at gunpoint aboard the Queen
Mary. ‘She smelled good!’ he thought, ‘and she was pretty, and funny, too.’
That was on the set of a TV show called Airwolf. They began dating a year later, married in 1989, and had Taylor four years after that.
The pair now live frugally in California, not far from where Cranston grew up. Lockdown has given them their longest time together ‘for years’. And since ‘there’s always something to do around the house’, or at least baking to do, he’s cherished it.
‘When you’re in a position where you’re together with your spouse more than you ever have been because of restrictions, I think it illuminates a good relationship [but] it exacerbates a bad relationship,’ he says. ‘Both sides are good. If a bad relationship is exposed during a pandemic, and it breaks a couple up, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.’
He and Dearden are firmly in the ‘good relationship’ category. It is a marriage built on humour. Cranston proposed in a bubble bath, the ring on his little toe. At the wedding, he pranked his bride by unfurling a 3ft-long scroll of paper from which to read his vows. And Dearden is quick to contribute delightfully teasing quotes to articles venerating her husband, such as this, about seeing him grin: ‘You’re completely confused,’ she said, ‘because the smile doesn’t go with that face.’ But just as important is honesty. Since before they were married they’ve had a rule: if one or the other wants to go to couples’ therapy, it’s non-negotiable.
‘It’s because [the marriage] was important to us, we wanted to have it last our entire lives, so we came up with that policy. No discussion, no argument,’ he says. ‘That helps a lot. Invariably we go in there and I think I’m just gonna listen, then all of a sudden someone says something and you realise you’ve been harbouring some thoughts and resentments you weren’t consciously aware of at the time.’
He slips back into paternal-counsel mode. ‘You know, in marriages you often swim together in unison, agreeing on most things, and then it’s like…’ He mimes two fish alongside one another suddenly diverging. ‘“Oh what happened there?” You get off the track, so you figure out what went wrong, and just have to make a correction.’
After more than 40 years as an actor, Cranston is now a Hollywood elder statesman. ‘When it’s time to quit,’ he says, ‘I’ll know. I won’t be wearing an earpiece with someone whispering my lines offstage. If my faculties fail me, I’m gone. I’ll just retire.’ He’s done just about all of it. He has had a private audience with Barack Obama, hosted Saturday Night Live and won or been nominated for just about every award going. But all of this came in the past decade. Getting there involved a route so slow, meandering and patient that if it doesn’t serve as a motivational fable in acting circles, it really should.
Born in Hollywood, he was the middle child of Annalisa (known as Peggy) and Joe, who’d met in an acting class. Peggy gave up on dramatic ambitions to become an Avon lady. The pugnacious and temperamental Joe, meanwhile, was a struggling actor.
Theirs was an often argument-filled household, especially when Joe’s career slipped. When he spent increasing amounts of time away from the family home – eventually moving out permanently – to spend time with another woman, Cranston used to lie to his friends that his dad merely worked a lot. The house was repossessed when Cranston was 11, resulting in he and Kyle, his elder brother, moving in with one set of grandparents, while his mother and younger sister, Amy, went to the other.
‘I saw the looks on our neighbours’ faces, somehow both judgemental and pitying. We were disgraced. Worse, we were forced to leave what comforts remained of our home,’ Cranston wrote in his memoir, A Life in Parts. ‘I had been under the impression all this time
‘Lockdown illuminates a good relationship but exacerbates a bad one’
that we owned our house. I came to understand that the word own is often used loosely.’
The next year, the siblings attended a courtroom where, unbeknown to them, their parents were finalising their divorce. Outside, Joe was punched in the face by a man whose wife he’d started a relationship with, and would later marry. Cranston didn’t see him again for a decade. Afterwards, Peggy became an alcoholic (a glamorous one, Cranston compares her to Blanche Dubois), and the family survived on food stamps.
‘One of the things I’m most grateful about is that I was poor,’ he tells me. ‘My family was fractured. It was bad. There was drug abuse, alcoholism. It was decimated. When you go through an experience like that as a boy, you respect it more. So [now] I don’t expect any special treatment, I’m just a working actor who’s grateful.’
With that beginning, he struggled in school, but came top of the class in the Police Explorers, a sort of junior LAPD, and set his heart on becoming a police officer. Cheerfully, he recalls in his book how he lost his virginity to a prostitute in Salzburg during one trip with the group.
A motorcycle tour around the US with Kyle later saw him drop the idea of police work and replace it with acting. The brothers traced their father shortly thereafter, starting a repair job that took decades. By the time Joe passed away in 2014 (Peggy died from Alzheimer’s a decade earlier), he had been a regular fixture at his son’s premieres. When the family cleared his home out after his death, Taylor found a note that read: ‘The highlight of my life was when my children forgave me.’
It reads very movingly, I tell Cranston. He doesn’t seem so sure. ‘It’s difficult. I don’t know if it’s entirely accurate,’ he says. ‘I was on my way to forgiveness, I don’t know that I was completely without resentment or anger towards him. He deserted our family, and never really came back in as a fully fledged father. It was a work in progress.’
For decades, Cranston played bit-parts in whatever television show would have him, supporting himself with ancillary work as, variously, a security guard, house decorator, lifeguard, baggage carrier, souvenir seller,
carnival barker, and ordained minister, marrying couples in whatever way they wanted, including with him dressed as Elvis.
In the 1980s he won a recurring role in a New York soap opera, Loving, then lost it. He played Tim, ‘dentist to the stars’, in Seinfeld,
then that ended too, before he became if not a household name then certainly a household face in Malcolm in the Middle. Then, in 2008, aged 52, Breaking Bad happened.
Initially, producers scoffed at the idea of a middling comedic actor playing a chemistry teacher who, given a terminal cancer diagnosis, creates unusually pure crystal meth and slides into a life of crime – turning, as Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, had it, ‘from Mr Chips to Scarface’. But Gilligan had worked with Cranston on an episode of The X Files,
and believed he could be both sympathetic and menacing.
It became the role of Cranston’s life. Breaking Bad was compared to Shakespeare; Stephen King said it ‘surpassed The Sopranos’; Sir Anthony Hopkins wrote Cranston a fan letter. He has conceded it’ll be ‘the opening line of my obituary [and] that’s fine with me’, but the five seasons were emotionally and physically relentless. A more method actor might have struggled; as it was, all Cranston’s jobbing experience was useful.
‘I’ve been an actor for 40 years, and we have to uproot ourselves, move and replant,’ he says. ‘I was able to flip a switch when I was at the end of a day playing Walter White and leave him at the studio until the next morning.’
He became a friend and father figure to Aaron Paul, who played White’s righthand man, Jesse Pinkman, and the pair started a mescal brand, Dos Hombres, in 2019.
‘We’re very, very close. The whole reason we did Dos Hombres was that when we came to the end of Breaking Bad, we didn’t get to see one another very much. He said, “Let’s start a mescal business.” I thought it was crazy, but it’s been fun, and we get to see each other.’
From Breaking Bad to Your Honor – notwithstanding his Tony-winning role as Howard Beale in the stage adaptation of Network, which ran at the National Theatre in 2017, film roles in everything from Argo to Godzilla, and an Emmy-nominated turn as President Lyndon Johnson in the Broadway play and TV film All the Way – Cranston appears to return again and again to the idea of good men being capable of extreme, sometimes immoral behaviour.
‘From an audience standpoint, isn’t it more interesting?’ he asks. ‘A person who doesn’t have flaws, or weaknesses, or frailties? I don’t know what that is.’ He willingly admits to his own flirtations with extreme urges. There is a startling passage in his book about a mentally distressed ex-girlfriend, Ava, tracking him down to his apartment in New York in the ’80s. Terrified she was going to hurt him, he writes that he ‘slammed her head against a brick wall. Months and months of fury rippled throughout me… But I was also surprisingly calm. Clumps of her hair and bits of skin and brain matter stuck to the brick. Blood formed on the wall and then began dribbling to the floor. The screaming stopped, of course.’
He then reveals it was a dream, manifested by fear, and in reality he was wrapped in a ball on the floor. Ava really had visited and screamed at his door, but the neighbours had called the police, who’d taken her away.
In an age where virtue is held above all else, I say, and social media’s discovery of past indiscretions – even imagined ones – could cause a hurricane of controversy, it seems courageous to have included the story.
‘I didn’t see it as brave, I saw it as human. Are there not times over the course of a person’s life when you’ve felt rage that stemmed from fear, that gave you the impression you were capable of killing someone else?’
He sighs. ‘You’re a young man, maybe you haven’t had an experience like that. But when you’re my age, you might think, “There was a time when I was so angry, I really felt that if I was pushed one more time I would have popped.” So you look back in gratitude that it didn’t escalate to that point.’
Cranston is on Twitter and Instagram, where he has a combined following of five million, but uses it mainly to promote work, urge people to vote, post the odd selfie and hawk mescal. Does he ever worry he might say the wrong thing, or some sort of skeleton will be disinterred that sees him get cancelled?
‘No,’ he replies. ‘I want to be able to spread truth and opinion, but I’m not worried about that.’ Still, cancel culture – and the price some pay for their behaviour – is on his mind.
‘It makes me think, “Where does forgiveness have a place in our society?” Someone who cracks a joke 10 years ago, and now is ostracised because of it, because the mores have changed? Is that effective? Is that right? That level of cancel culture is dangerous…’
A pause, for a brief think, then he readies his judgement. ‘However, if someone repeatedly does something that is detrimental to the peace of our culture and society over and over again, and they get cancelled? I don’t think that’s wrong at all. It’s a way of self-policing.’ There’s the Cranston verdict, though I bet it isn’t case closed. He smiles, and best be off. That sourdough won’t bake itself, after all. Your Honor is on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from Tuesday
‘One of the things I’m most grateful about is that I was poor. My family was fractured’