Bryan Cranston Is Ready For Anything
“He was the assistant night manager at this fast food restaurant,” says Cranston, “and he looked at me and at my motorcycle and was crestfallen. He just looked at me with envy like, ‘God, I wish I could do that.’ He had already told himself at 19 years old, ‘I need to stay here at this fast food restaurant and work for, at the time, $3.75 an hour or whatever it was. And I’ll never forget his look. I felt so sorry for him because, at 19 years old, he had already put himself in a box that he didn’t feel he could get out of. I never want to be in that box.”
The thing is to voluntarily put yourself into the role of a beginner…That’s seeking adventure in life, and I like adventure.
So, Cranston never got into the box. Instead, he used his hard-earned, put-your-head-down-but-keep-your-chin-up attitude to go into the family business, such as it is. He punched in, and hasn’t punched out yet. Instead, he has blasted through the next three decades of jobs, always remembering to let his hair grow long during the breaks, just in case the next project required something a little different.
Different? Ha! If you were to graph the various credits on the lower two-thirds of Cranston’s lengthy IMDB page (it’s an interesting read, if you’ve got an hour to kill), on pretty much any axis you can dream up, it’d look like a Jackson Pollock painting. There was the Preparation H commercial; his short stint as the borderline anti-Semitic dentist on Seinfeld; voicework on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers; Hal the hapless father on Malcolm in the Middle; and bit parts on, among many, many others, Walker Texas Ranger, Touched by an Angel, and The King of Queens.
As Tim Whatley in Seinfeld.
Which isn’t to say that Hollywood didn’t try to stuff him into a box. When they wrapped Malcolm in the Middle in 2006, offers to inhabit other iterations of The Hapless Father came filing in, but that had been done. What hadn’t been done? Playing a father who wasn’t hapless, but maybe was evil, or at least had that capacity. In retrospect, the success seems inevitable: of course Cranston could play a suburban dad, diagnosed with cancer who turns into a meth-making badass. But cast your mind back to 2008. It seemed improbable, a stretch too far. He proved everyone so wrong, we forgot we were wrong to begin with.
Then, inevitably, the gangster-type pitched followed the game-changing success of Breaking Bad. For all its creativity, showbiz sometimes suffers from a lack of imagination. But that doesn’t mean that Cranston has to have one.
“The thing is to voluntarily put yourself into the role of a beginner,” he explains. “Not many people like to do that and it’s harder as you get older. We have a tendency to say, ‘well this is what I do and this is what I don’t do,’ and we separate those two things. I hope that I will be the person who says, ‘well, I’ve never done that. Let’s try it. I’m not sure if I’m going to like this or not, but let me try it.’ That’s seeking adventure in life, and I like adventure. I want experiences.”
