Bryan Cranston Is Ready For Anything
Bryan Cranston is going rogue. At least when it comes to grooming. He’s letting his hair grow. Not just his head, but his face, too. It’s a good beard, full and thick with bits of red and brown and a touch of grey — very much on trend — but that’s not the point. He’s letting himself grow, not because he doesn’t care how he looks, but because he does.
Partly, it’s a work thing. Because, when you’re a working actor like Cranston — a descriptor that, after more than 35 years and hundreds of credits in the business, Cranston essentially defines — your livelihood depends on your ability to convince others that you’re the most ready person in a room full of ready people. Sure, he’s a star now, but for three quarters of that career, Cranston was a hoofer, a bit part wonder. And to keep those parts coming, he had to out-ready the competition. The role needs a moustache? He’s got one. The character has a ponytail? He’s already halfway there. Shaved head? That’s easy. And sure, on one level it’s just a man actively not doing anything, keeping his canvas as blank as possible. But it’s also a metaphor for the way this particular man lives his life. Bryan Cranston is ready for anything.
There’s something about staying a little on edge that keeps me alive.
Maybe he learned it from his parents. Two actors who treated the vaunted profession like real jobs. They weren’t stars, they were actors: punching in and out of flicks. Almost blue collar-like, this acting without fame. As such, it’d be easy to write off his arrival in showbiz at age 26 as inevitable, but the truth is that neither of his parents ever succeeded in making the family business look all that glamorous: his mother quit to raise the kids, and his father, always working paycheque to paycheque, left the family when he was 12.
“There was abandonment and alcohol abuse and resentment and anger and being broke and having our house foreclosed on and having to live with relatives,” says Cranston, remembering the years that followed. “There was a lot of stuff.”
But, they managed, and as children of fractured homes often do, Cranston learned young a lesson his father seemed to struggle with: success wasn’t about luck, but preparation, persistence and patience.
Let’s start then with the preparation: When he was 19 years old, he and his older brother packed their lives onto a pair of motorcycles and set out on what would be a two year adventure across America — the epic kind of wanderlust satisfaction that now only seems to come packaged in a three-minute Vimeo documentary, artfully shot by drone — working for a few bucks at a café in one city, a few more at a diner in the next, a brief stint at a carnival, or wherever else they could make enough to get back on the road.
Before he left, he ran into an old high school friend.
