The staggering was all wrong. And the flailing? Unacceptable. Bryan Cranston turned from the video playback with a grin. A few weeks before, he had shot the last episode of “Breaking Bad,” the AMC series that gave him what he calls “the role that will undoubtedly be the first line of my obituary.” Now he was on the set of “Godzilla,” a Warner Bros. remake. In this scene, Cranston, playing the top scientist at a Tokyo nuclear facility, was having an intense argument that’s interrupted by a seismic jolt. Behind him, jumpsuit-wearing extras had begun reeling about as if they were in a cheaply enjoyable fifties version of the story, rather than in the expensively enjoyable version that Warner Bros. hoped to produce. “Doesn’t work, does it?” he said. The director, Gareth Edwards, an Englishman working on his first studio film, gave a rueful nod. “What I tell the background guys when I direct,” Cranston said afterward, referring to the television episodes he’s directed, “is ‘Don’t do it, think it.’ If you just think, This guy’s a douche bag, it will come through your eyes.”
On this June morning, all the elements were in place for a pro-forma blockbuster: a nine-figure budget, the most awesome mutant lizard that computers could generate, and a colossal monument to hubris soon to lie in ruins—the nuclear facility, played by the sludge-control building of a wastewater-treatment plant near Vancouver. The afternoon’s filming would consist of camera-car shots of swarms of extras racing down an endless concrete corridor and Cranston barking into a walkie-talkie as he raced the other way: the Hollywood disaster film in sum.
Yet one reason that the filmmakers cast Cranston, a three-time Emmy winner on “Breaking Bad,” was to distinguish this “Godzilla” from a standard remake. Sue Kroll, the president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros., says, “When non-fanboys see that Bryan is in it, they’ll hesitate and think, That’s interesting—I wonder what he saw in the role?” The actor has become the studios’ ancho chili, the ingredient that adds distinction to any dish. When Ben Affleck was preparing “Argo,” in 2011, he told his producer, Grant Heslov, that he wanted to hire Cranston. “Yeah, we should,” Heslov replied. “We’re the only movie coming out next year that doesn’t have him in it.”
Cranston serves projects as a one-man truth squad. It begins with his appearance: age has favored him with the craggy, slab-jawed countenance of a religious elder. He smiles a lot—at fifty-seven, he has responded to his late stardom with boyish ardor—but when he smiles “you’re completely confused,” his wife, Robin Dearden, says, “because the smile doesn’t go with that face.”
On “Godzilla,” Cranston radiated vigilance. In one scene, his character, Joe Brody, walks briskly with an administrator named Stan as the two scan a printout of seismic activity. Stan wonders whether it shows earthquakes, but Brody says, “No, no—earthquakes are random and jagged. This is steady and increasing.” Between takes, Cranston tweaked the dichotomy to “random, jagged” and “consistent, increasing” to give it a scientist’s concision and to avoid the paradox of “steady and increasing.” He persuaded Edwards to shoot the moment not as a walk-and-talk and a closeup but in one go. “It’s an affirmation of what Joe already knows,” he pointed out—no spoilers, but the movie is called “Godzilla”—“so he wants to move.” Then he surveyed the extras and murmured, “There’s a guy reading a manual in the background—would that happen?” Noticing that Edwards was beginning to resemble St. Sebastian, Cranston patted his shoulder and said, “Never mind, never mind—I’m picky. We’re good!”
Cranston has time for such troubleshooting because he’s not one of those broody actors who wrap themselves in a Navajo blanket and insist on being addressed only as Mr. Wolverine. He gets into character instantly and can produce wracking sobs on cue (the secret, he learned from a stint in soap operas, is to hydrate days in advance). Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Cranston as a seedy mechanic in “Drive,” says, “Bryan Cranston can play anything, anytime, anywhere, any way.”
On “Action!,” as the next scene began, Cranston instantly became a preoccupied Joe Brody, resisting Stan’s attempts to stifle his concerns and keep the plant operating. But when Cranston was supposed to bark, “I have operational authority,” it came out as “I have control authority.” Without skipping a beat, he continued, “I am the Secret Santa to all these guys!” and everyone cracked up. Cranston—a master of the blown-take button and the vibrator hidden in a co-star’s drawer—uses anarchy strategically, to keep his sets relaxed. The first time he directed an episode of “Breaking Bad,” he arrived wearing a beret and a monocle and carrying a horsewhip. Between takes now, he played the bongos on the crew’s hard hats, duckwalked, dipped into a British chav accent, and recited Samuel L. Jackson’s “motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane!” speech, getting Jackson’s indignant cadences just right.
Meanwhile, take by take, Joe Brody shrugged Stan off more and more touchily. Cranston had suggested that Stan drag Joe aside. “In order to stop me, at this point, he’s got to physically stop me,” he explained. “And my reaction—that I wouldn’t feel right about letting him move me like I was a little boy—helps create a history and a mood.” Edwards told me, “There’s a fine line between a great, character-driven movie and a throwaway popcorn flick, and that little scene is one of my favorites, because it helps us harken back to a seventies-movie feel. The layer of history Bryan created—that Joe and Stan are good friends, but their friendship is being severely tested—wasn’t at all on the page.” He laughed. “The problem with Bryan is that he comes with a lot of ideas, and you have to say ‘Damn it,’ and rethink everything, because he’s always right.”
If you’re always right, you may not always be in the right place. In his trailer, Cranston told me that when he trumpeted a few recent offers to his wife the skeptical tilt of her head made him realize that he’d been indiscriminate. He wanted to carve out time to pursue a deal he’d made with Sony Television to produce his own shows, and also wanted to pick roles that forced him to stretch. “You never want to repeat yourself,” he told me. “Otherwise, it’s just”—he named a well-known actor—“doing his thing.” He leaped to his feet, raised an imaginary pistol, and shouted, “Get down! Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!,” followed by “Because right now you’re safest with me!” and “He’s my son!” He shrugged. “You can write the dialogue before you see the film.”
So he’d constructed a grid in blue ballpoint: the Cranston Project Assessment Scale. On the left were rankings from Very Good to Poor, and across the top, in decreasing order of importance, were Story, Script, Role, Director, and Cast. A very good story was worth ten points, a very good cast only two. Story and script count the most, he said, because “an actor can only raise the level of bad writing by a grade. C writing, and I don’t care if you’re Meryl Streep—you can only raise it to a B.” After factoring in bonus points (high salary = +1; significant time away from family = –3), he’d pass on a project that scored less than 16 points, consider one from 16 to 20, accept one from 21 to 25, and accept with alacrity one from 26 to 32. “ ‘Argo’ was a twenty-eight,” he explained, showing his addition. “Ben was a three as a director—he was ‘good’—and now he’s a four, ‘Argo’ says. ‘Godzilla’ was a twenty, on the high end of ‘consider.’ I was dubious, but when I read the script I was surprised—you care about these people, and you’ve got Godzilla.”
After a thirteen-hour day at the waste-treatment plant, a day that had been smelly, noisy, and numbingly fluorescent, Cranston retained an expectant “Where’s the after-party?” air. “As they take the wig off, I’ll put a hot towel on my face and wash the character away,” he said. “And it’s then, for the first time, that I’ll realize how tired I am. Remember the plate spinner on the ‘Sullivan’ show? I’m a plate spinner. I used to think you could never have too many.”
For years, Cranston scrabbled after guest-star roles on crappy TV shows while making his living in commercials. He played a bland smoothie with bread-loaf hair who just happened to love Shield Deodorant Soap, Arrow Shirts, Coffee-mate, and Excedrin, a middle-of-the-bell-curve guy who, despite his initial skepticism, was really sold on the product: “Now you can relieve inflamed hemorrhoidal tissue with the oxygen action of Preparation H.” He says, “I had that everyman look—nonthreatening, non-distracting, no facial hair. I fit in.”
As he was often the last person cast on a show or film, his strategy was to play the opposite of what the ensemble already had. Drama is conflict, after all. When he auditioned for the father on “Malcolm in the Middle,” the Fox sitcom about a crew of unruly brothers, he knew that the boys’ mother was bombastic, fearless, and insightful, so he played the father as gentle, timid, and obtuse. “It was a genius way to make an underwritten part work,” Linwood Boomer, the show’s creator, says. “By the third episode, we realized we had to do a lot more writing for the guy.”
“Malcolm” aired from 2000 to 2006, and established Cranston as a television fixture, if not a star. Yet even after he landed the lead in “Breaking Bad,” in 2007, he framed his character, Walter White, as an opposite—in this case, the opposite of the man Walter would become. The show is about a fifty-year-old high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque who, after getting a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, secretly works with a former student, the sweet yo-yo Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to make enough crystal meth to leave a nest egg for his family. Walt’s extremely pure product becomes wildly successful, but at great cost to everyone around him.
Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and executive producer, had sold it to the AMC network as “a man who goes from Mr. Chips to Scarface,” and, in the pilot, Walt tells his students that chemistry is “the study of change.” But Cranston quietly shifted the arc from good-man-becomes-bad to invisible-man-becomes-vivid. In pre-production, Gilligan recalls, Cranston began to construct an ideal nebbish: “Bryan said, ‘I think I should have a mustache, and it should be light and thin and look like a dead caterpillar, and I should be pale, and a little doughier, a hundred and eighty-six pounds.’ ”
Cranston explains, “I wanted Walt to have the body type of my dad, who’s now eighty-nine, like Walt was a much older man. When I was studying my dad, taking on his posture and burdens—I didn’t tell him I was doing it—I noticed I was also taking on some of his characteristics, the ‘Aw, jeez,’ or an eye roll, or”—he gave a skeptical grimace—“when Jesse did something stupid.”
Gilligan, an amiable, fatalistic Virginian, says, “I had a very schematic understanding of Walt in the early going. I was thinking structurally: we’d have a good man beset from all sides by remorseless fate.” Not only does Walt have cancer, an empty savings account, and searing regrets about his career path but his son has cerebral palsy and his wife, Skyler, is unexpectedly pregnant. Gilligan gave a wry smile. “The truth is you have to be very schematic indeed to force someone into cooking crystal meth.”
Instead, Cranston played the role so that Walter’s lung-cancer diagnosis catalyzes a gaudy midlife crisis—so that a luna moth breaks from the drabbest of cocoons. Across the show’s five seasons, which depict a lively two years, Walt is increasingly inhabited by Heisenberg, his drug-dealing pseudonym and alter ego—a figure Cranston describes as “the emotionless, brave, risk-taking imaginary friend who looks out for Walt’s best interests.” Early in the first season, when Walt scurries out of his Pontiac Aztek to retrieve the drug dealer Krazy-8, who lies unconscious on a suburban corner in broad daylight, he’s terrified of being seen, and takes tiny nerdy steps, his shoulders twitching with self-consciousness. There is a touch of Hal, the father Cranston played on “Malcolm in the Middle,” about him still—he might almost waggle his hands in panic for comic effect. (The first season of the show was particularly funny, if darkly so, and Vince Gilligan asked his colleagues whether he should submit it to the Emmys as a drama or a comedy.)
After undergoing chemotherapy, Walt shaves his head and grows a Vandyke, alpha-male plumage that helps him play the bruiser. By the end of the second season, he rousts two would-be meth cooks from his territory with pure assurance: a wide stance, arms relaxed yet poised to strike. And when he reveals his hidden powers to his wife in the famous “I am the one who knocks!” speech, he levels his hand at her like a gun. “The more believable humanity of Walter White—the discovery that he’s not a good man but an everyman—is due to Bryan,” Gilligan said. “The writers realized, from his acting, that Walt isn’t cooking for his family; he’s cooking for himself.”
By the fifth season, having killed Krazy-8 and become responsible for at least a hundred and ninety-four other deaths, Walt has no anxiety left. His voice is low and commanding, his manner brash—he’s eager to be seen. He was cowed at first by his brother-in-law, Hank Schrader, a bluff D.E.A. agent who treats him with kindly contempt. But soon enough he’s snarling at Hank, “I’m done explaining myself,” and taunting him for misidentifying Heisenberg: “This genius of yours, maybe he’s still out there.” Then he eliminates his boss, a drug lord named Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), by blowing his face off with a wheelchair bomb. As Walt takes on the role of the dominant dealer, Cranston has him unconsciously appropriate some of Esposito’s coiled stillness. “I wanted to plant a subliminal thing with the audience,” he says. “But it was Bryan who modelled Walt’s body language on Gus’s—Walt didn’t know what he was doing. All he knew is that he felt more confident with his shoulders back.”
In movies, unless you’re the star, you’re going to play an archetype. Studios, noticing the authority in Cranston’s persona, have often cast him as a colonel (“Saving Private Ryan,” “John Carter,” “Red Tails”). Ben Affleck, who hired him to be the C.I.A.’s version of a colonel in “Argo,” says, “Bryan is the boss you might actually like. He’s not a general and he’s not a sergeant—he’s a colonel.” Yet Cranston’s friend Jason Alexander, who starred as George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” says, “Bryan doesn’t play an idea particularly well, those military roles. That’s because his strongest card is complexity, where you can’t figure out what he represents until he gradually reveals himself.” A producer friend of Cranston’s observes that he doesn’t stand out in such films as “Total Recall,” where he chewed the scenery as a dictator, “because he wasn’t reined in. Actors want to act, but you need someone who will say, ‘Give me the take where he’s doing less.’ ”
A cable series, a format that showcases accretive subtlety, is where Cranston could truly shine. Luckily, cable’s golden age arrived just as he did. “Bryan had to grow into his weight as an actor,” John O’Hurley, a close friend of Cranston’s since the mid-eighties, when they were both married to the same woman on the soap opera “Loving,” says. “He became dangerous when he began letting his eyes go dead. It’s the sign of a man with nothing to lose.”
In Hollywood, where everyone routinely calls everyone else a genius, the praise Cranston inspires is remarkably fervent. It borders on envy, not just of his talent but of his expansive approach to life. “Bryan would be the guy to be stuck on a desert island with,” Jane Kaczmarek, who played the mother on “Malcolm in the Middle,” says. “Not only would he be great company but he’d build you a hut and find you some food.” “Breaking Bad” ’s Aaron Paul says, “He’s my mentor, and hands down the greatest guy I’ll ever work with.” And Frankie Muniz, who played Malcolm on “Malcolm in the Middle,” says, “I remember thinking, Man, I want to be Bryan when I’m older. He was like the perfect Hollywood movie dad. He was almost too perfect.”
Cranston’s warmth and his interest in helping young people are genuine. (He and his wife are mainstays of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.) They are also an aspect of the public work of being “Bryan Cranston,” which of late has become an extremely demanding role. When I walked around Manhattan with the actor last fall, he was unfailingly charming with the many, many people who recognized him as Walter White. When one woman wanted her picture taken with him, after he posed for one with her boyfriend, he snarled, “I’ll take a photo with him, but you? You disgust me!” Then he laughed and flung an arm around her.
“Bryan’s really good at it,” Robin Dearden says. “But it takes him longer to shut that off than it does to get out of character—it usurps his energy, overwhelms him. When he comes home, the last thing he wants is a woman’s chat”—she laughed. “I try not to take it personally when he gets curt, because one reason he gets exhausted is that after years of trying so hard to get anything he could, he doesn’t have that gauge of, ‘O.K., I’ve done enough now.’ ”
Fame can blunt an actor’s acuity; he can’t study people because they’re always studying him. Cranston says, “I used to just watch people at malls, to get out of that rut where there’s too much of you seeping into your roles, where your character is ‘Me, but with a hat!’ ” By way of example, he cycled rapidly through Robert De Niro’s scowl, Jimmy Stewart’s stammer, and Al Pacino’s chesty roar. “But now when I watch people, working to get away from my Bryanisms”—the tics taken from his father; a sagging-jaw move he does to demonstrate awe—“I have to wear dark glasses and ear buds and nod my head, so people think I’m listening to music.” He avoids dining out, and has developed tricks for gliding around incognito: feigning interest in his cell phone, sitting near older people in airport lounges because they’re less likely to recognize him. “I wouldn’t mind being a hermit when I’m not working,” he told me.
Playing other people allows Cranston to be most vividly himself. In late June, he spent four hours in a basement sound studio on the DreamWorks Animation lot, in Glendale. It was his first recording session for “Kung Fu Panda 3,” in which he’ll play a new character, Lee Shen—the biological father of Jack Black’s Po. The first scenes went slowly, as the director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, nudged Cranston to make Lee stern yet not uncaring, and to sharpen the enmity between Lee and Mr. Ping, the talkative goose who raised Po. Late in the day, Cranston’s stomach growled, and he said, as Lee, “I’m still hungry. I should have eaten that goose.” Warming to the idea, he became a broadcaster: “True Hollywood Confessions: When ‘Kung Fu Panda’ went horribly wrong.” He bent down, as Cranston again, to answer an imaginary phone call from the head of the studio. “Yes, Mr. Katzenberg,” he whispered. “No, no—it wasn’t me. It was Jennifer! She went crazy!” He listened, his eyes widening as if Katzenberg were reading his thoughts. “Yes, exactly like a drunken goose!”
One afternoon, Cranston set aside some time to check on his prostheses. KNB EFX Group, the special-effects studio that did the makeup for “Breaking Bad,” had made him a ski-jump nose, Buddha earlobes, and saggy cheeks tethered to a cleft chin. The actor was going to play Lyndon Johnson in Robert Schenkkan’s “All the Way,” a show about Johnson’s first year as President. (It opens this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing for a bid at Broadway.) Cranston was uncertain he was up to the challenge, which thrilled him. He’d been reading everything he could about Johnson and listening to his Oval Office tapes, but the physical appropriation would be his gateway in.
At KNB, in a room presided over by a maquette of Doctor Evil, a technician dabbed on the appliqués and turned Cranston to the mirror. “Aw, jeez!” Cranston said, delighted. “I already have the thin lips, the forehead lines and pinched brow. And the receding hairline and hooded eyes. So now imagine the hair back!” He practiced working his lobes into place, murmuring, “Now, now, it’s just a girl putting on earrings is all.” Cranston’s voice eased toward a Texas Hill Country drawl, breathy yet clenched, so “now” came out as “na.” “It’s scary,” he said, “but you try to trust that the more you absorb through osmosis, the more he becomes a part of me, and then suddenly”—he patted his belly—“oh, there he is!” He turned, strode up too close, and thumped me on the chest: “Na, come on, Tad, ya gonna hep me with this vote!”
The actors Cranston looks to—Spencer Tracy, Jack Lemmon, Rod Steiger—make you forget you’re watching a performance. You think of them not as stars but in specific roles. The present-day actor he most admires is Mark Rylance, a Brit best known for his galvanic theatrical work. He told me, “He’s got a little more recklessness, maybe. It feels like if they told Mark, ‘Oh, your character enters masturbating, full frontal,’ he’d go, ‘Sure, let’s try that tonight.’ Whereas, if I’m honest, I’d go, ‘Oh, wow—really? Hmm.’ ”
If Cranston has boundaries in his acting, they’re not immediately apparent. In the “Malcolm in the Middle” pilot, he was introduced as a naked man whose wife was shaving his pelt of body hair (actually, glued-on yak hair). “He was so relaxed we thought that there might be something wrong with him, that he might be too into it,” Linwood Boomer says. The show’s writers tried to devise an indignity that would make Cranston balk, but he embraced them all, from gyrating in the nude as the ballad “Show and Tell” played to being covered with thirty thousand live bees. (Cranston always lets bees land on him, mystified by his companions’ alarm, but in this case, he admits, “one of them stung me right on the nutsack.”)
Robin Dearden says, “There are two things Bryan owns that I wish I had: he doesn’t worry, and he’s not afraid. And, because he’s not afraid, the bees don’t sting him. His whole premise in life is ‘What have you got to lose?’ I think that comes from his childhood. He fell off the cliff, they all went over, and there really wasn’t any more to lose.”
A few months ago, Cranston gazed at his childhood home, a small, three-bedroom ranch house in Canoga Park, at the cheaper end of Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. There were mounds of cigarette butts and trash bags by the door and a dead Toyota in the yard. “It’s bad, it’s a shitty house now,” he said, turning to the street. “Me and my older brother Kyle and the neighborhood boys would play baseball here”—a hedge marked the outfield wall—“and do the resin gag, driving people crazy at night with resin on a string: ‘Squeak, squeak, squeak!’ ” If they got bored, they could ride the Cranstons’ pet donkey, Tom.
Cranston’s parents, Joe and Peggy, met in an acting class, and Cranston, the middle of three children, was born in 1956. He was a freckled kid with an impish squint whose nickname was Sneaky Pete. “I was sly, I guess, always looking for shortcuts,” he said. “ ‘What do I need to do to get a C?’ ” His father, who’d been a boxer in his youth, and who still settled disputes with his fists, was a handsome, gregarious man who appeared in shows such as “Dragnet” and “My Three Sons” and drive-in movies like “Beginning of the End,” in which he was devoured by locusts. Joe was always cooking up moneymaking schemes: a trampoline park, a night club attached to a bowling alley, houses he’d flip for two hundred and fifty dollars down. “We put in a pool one year,” Cranston said, “and then my mother said we couldn’t afford the chemicals to swim in it, so we just let the water stagnate.” From the look of things—Cranston shinnied up the back fence to take a peek—the water hadn’t been changed since.
His parents separated when he was twelve. “My dad wanted desperately to be successful, and he wasn’t, and it just brought him to his knees,” Cranston said. “He stole away some other guy’s wife.” (According to Joe Cranston, the relationship began after he and the woman were separated from their spouses.) “It was a real love affair for them, but . . . I remember lying to my friends, saying, ‘Oh, yeah—my dad comes home late at night, he gets us up in the morning, we play.’ ”
The family’s house was foreclosed on, and Bryan and Kyle lived with their mother’s parents for a time, while their mother and their younger sister, Amy, moved in with their father’s mother. It was a painful and confusing period: Peggy Cranston brought the kids with her to divorce proceedings, but didn’t explain that she and Joe were getting divorced. Afterward, she and the children lived with three boarders in a house that had one bathroom, surviving on food stamps. “My mother had a great zest for life, but when my father rejected her it just destroyed her,” Cranston said. “She became like Blanche DuBois with men, she wallowed in anxiety, depression, and alcoholism, and she lived in clutter.” At Cranston’s house now—a comfortable clapboard affair with a pool out back, at the palmier end of the Valley—he labels everything, and expects his wife and daughter to put in at least an hour a week tidying up.
The elementary school down the street was a refuge. In fifth grade, Cranston got the lead role of Professor Flipnoodle in the school play, “The Time Machine.” One of his lines was “President Lincoln will finish writing the Gettysburg Address when he returns to the White House.” Instead, he said “to the White Front,” a local chain store. “Boom, life stopped,” he recalled. “Every single person was laughing at me. There were, I’m not exaggerating, men kneeling in the aisles, helpless with laughter.” (Kyle Cranston says, “It was very embarrassing for Bryan, and for our parents, but I thought it was hilarious.”) “It was awful,” Cranston continued. “The experience probably had something to do with me pushing away from performing for a long time.” In high school, he was the top cadet in the L.A.P.D. Law Enforcement Explorers Program, and he thought he might become a cop.
The Cranston children didn’t see their father for ten years. “My recollection is of a single mom and two older brothers who were my dads,” Amy Cranston says. Joe Cranston told me, in his apartment, “The family fell apart, everything fell apart.” He shaded his eyes, then flicked his hand away. “I like to omit that period of my life.” Joe lives in Studio City, a few miles from Bryan, and has fourteen prospective screenplays ready to go; a number of them are tailor-made for his son to star in, most recently a fourteen-million-dollar action project called “G.R.A.B.”
Cranston, who gently resists his father’s blandishments, said, “I try to remember the good stuff—him coaching my Little League team, or putting up the Christmas lights together.” Standing on the street in front of his old house, he took a last squint. “Someone else’s life now,” he said, evenly, then strode to his Audi.
“In writers’ rooms, being nerds, we talk in terms of characters’ superpowers,” Vince Gilligan says. “On the face of it, you’d think Walt’s superpower is his scientific genius. But, in our minds, Walt’s superpower is his ability to effortlessly lie to everyone. And the person he’s best at lying to is himself.” Walt’s lies are a reagent that leaches candor and trust from every relationship. In the third episode of the final eight, Skyler assures her sister, Marie Schrader, and Marie’s husband, Hank, that Walt’s out of the meth game. Marie cries, “How can we believe anything you say? There’s no telling where the lies begin and end.”
The series is a meditation on performance. Hank pretends that he doesn’t have P.T.S.D.; Skyler pretends to be a ditz to make the I.R.S. drop its criminal pursuit of her old boss; Jesse growls threats at his dealers over the phone, then looks to Walt for approval. Walt has just challenged Jesse, in one of the show’s touchstone speeches, to play the role he cast him for: “What does the blowfish do, Jesse? What does the blowfish do? . . . The blowfish puffs himself up!” Jesse was supposed to be killed off during the first season, and then Gilligan recognized that Aaron Paul’s Jesse and Cranston’s Walt met like flint and steel. But the warmth of Jesse and Walt’s father-son bond is also laced with violence, suspicion, and, on Walt’s part, a searing contempt for Jesse’s gullibility. It isn’t Walt’s horrific treatment of his wife that gradually alienates viewers; it’s the ruthless duplicity of his actions toward Jesse—his beloved son, the patsy.
The progress of Walter’s deceptive skill has a symphonic rise and fall. Early in the series, when Skyler accuses him one night of keeping a secret cell phone, he makes all the rookie mistakes. “A second cell phone?” he says, eyes wide and mouth agape. The next morning, compounding the error, he revisits the topic. As he spins a threadbare yarn, his hands fly up to flap Skyler’s doubts away, which only confirms her suspicions. Walt soon gets wise to this tell, and begins stuffing his hands in his pockets when he lies—except when he’s lying to himself. In the third season, he walks away from meth and informs Gus that an appeal to vanity won’t get him to return. “You believe I have some proprietary kind of selfishness about my own formula,” he says, almost sneering. “Some sort of”—hand flap—“overweening pride, I suppose? That you think simply”—hand flap—“overwhelms me.” Yep.
In the middle episodes of these final eight, when Walt tells whoppers to Skyler about how he got soaked in gasoline, or his urgent need to fix a soda machine (where he’s hidden a pistol), his hands again flap wildly. That’s because he’s tried to suppress Heisenberg—and, Cranston says, because “Walt is shot through with adrenaline and having to invent excuses on the fly. Human behavior never follows a smooth line.” When Walt has time to plan, as when he makes a “confession” tape in which he black-heartedly names Hank as the real criminal mastermind, his hands stay relaxed. Heisenberg is back in charge.
Gilligan says, “Walter White is the best actor in the world of ‘Breaking Bad.’ If you saw that confession tape, you’d think, This D.E.A. asshole really ran a number on the poor guy sitting on the edge of the bed.” Yet because Walt’s superpower has been revealed no one believes him, even when he’s telling the truth. In this past Sunday’s episode, Walt begs Jesse to recall all the ways he’s protected him over the years, pleading, “Don’t you know me by now?” Jesse replies, “I know you’re a lying, evil scumbag. That’s what I know.” This occurs while Jesse is flimflamming Walt into disclosing where he buried his money in the desert. “The student has become the teacher,” Gilligan says.
Even people who worked on the show lost their faith in Walt. Melissa Bernstein, a co-producer, says, “To the rest of us, it felt like, by the middle of the series, Walt had crossed over, had made too many bad choices. But Bryan never let go of Walt—he felt so strongly that there were pure motives there.” Cranston hopes that “Breaking Bad” will earn a place in the canon of American tragedies, and argues that the show will be tragic only if the audience believes to the end that Walt can still reverse his course. In the second season, he told Gilligan, “I really think Walt’s doing it for his family,” and Gilligan replied, “No, I think he’s actually kind of selfish.” Gilligan says, “It dawned on me, slowly, that I was telling the actor he’s mistaken about his own character—and that my stupidity was jeopardizing the whole show. You don’t have to be Freud to know that Hitler thought of himself as a wonderful guy.”
Smiling tightly, Cranston says, “I was able to keep that conversation at bay.” The actor can’t let himself know things that he knows. And so, for a long time, Cranston has been lying to himself that the monster he carries in his belly is a wonderful dad.
For two years, Cranston went to Los Angeles Valley College, where he earned an associate’s degree in police science—and discovered, when he took acting as an elective, that it awakened a long-slumbering curiosity. After graduating, he left on a motorcycle trip around the country with his brother, Kyle. It was 1976, and they were influenced as much by the TV show “Then Came Bronson,” with its Harley-Davidson-riding hero, as by “On the Road.” They worked at cafés and carnivals to cover food and gas, and slept behind schools and churches, meandering through more than forty states in two years.
In Daytona Beach, they sold Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil by day and acted at the Daytona Playhouse by night. One evening, as the king was dying in “The King and I,” Cranston, playing the retainer Kralahome, felt the undercoat of Vaseline on his eyelids melting into his eyes. “The tears start to flow, and I hear gasps in the first ten rows. They are thinking, Oh, my God, this guy is so into his role! It was a total accident, but I got so much praise. And I realized that in acting—unlike in high school—if you show vulnerability, you become attractive. It’s like you’ve suddenly got a grenade: power was at hand!”
When Cranston was twenty-one, he and Kyle took refuge from a heavy rain under a picnic shelter off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia. The storm lasted six days. One afternoon, having exhausted the time-killing powers of gin rummy and pushups, Cranston began reading “Hedda Gabler.” When he looked up, it was dark. Instantly, he says, “I understood that this is what I should be doing with my life. I came up with this motto: ‘Find something you love and hopefully become good at’—as opposed to ‘Find something you’re good at and hopefully fall in love with.’ ”
He moved back to Los Angeles with his girlfriend, an actress named Mickey Middleton, and began taking acting classes. (He and Middleton married in 1979 and divorced two years later.) If he felt too comfortable in a class, or too in thrall to its teacher, he’d move on. He studied Meisner and improv, tried est **{: .small}and psychotherapy and Scientology, and even worked as a comedian to conquer his fear of doing standup. “It was like putting together a bouquet,” he says.
After a few years, he began getting guest-star shots on TV shows such as “Murder, She Wrote” and “Matlock,” where the job was to wear an ill-fitting sports jacket and either get killed (just after saying something like “All right, Sissy—cool it”) or get caught (just after saying something like “There’s no way you can prove any of this”). Cranston shotgunned postcards out to casting directors to alert them to these appearances: “I knew ninety-nine per cent of them wouldn’t watch, but my face and name would get in front of them, and it would plant the subliminal message ‘He works a lot, this guy!’ ” He kept at it for more than a decade, without appreciable progress; in the eighties, his characters sent their loot to a Swiss bank account, and in the nineties to the Cayman Islands. The best thing about the guest spots was that in 1986, on a dudes-with-a-helicopter show called “Airwolf,” he struck up a lunchtime friendship with a funny and engaging co-star, Robin Dearden. They were married in 1989, and their daughter, Taylor, was born in 1993.
Though Cranston was making a good living from commercials, he felt close to creative despair. Early in their marriage, he told Dearden, “I feel I’m stuck on the junior varsity.” So she gave him a gift of private sessions with the self-help guru Breck Costin, who suggested that he focus on process, not outcome. Cranston says, “It incrementally came to me that when I audition I’m not trying to get a job, but to give them something, my acting. The victory is not ‘Did I beat that other guy out?’ but ‘Did I present that character as believably as I could?’ That was the turning point.”
In the mid-nineties, he gained some notice on “Seinfeld,” in the recurring role of Tim Whatley, a smarmy “dentist to the stars.” And in 1996 he landed a guest spot as a homeless guy on “Diagnosis Murder,” starring Dick Van Dyke. Watching the episode now, you can see Cranston rising above the material, as when he instructs Van Dyke how to go undercover as a vagrant (walk like your feet hurt; lose the smile). Van Dyke says, “I told Bryan, ‘I haven’t seen anyone that good on the show.’ And then I told everyone I could about this guy.” Joe Cranston recalls, with perhaps a touch of exaggeration, that Van Dyke “took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Your son is the greatest actor of all time.’ ”
Cranston often credits luck with his elevation to the varsity. In 1998, he got to play the astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” when another actor showed up too fat for the spacesuit. He landed the role on “Malcolm in the Middle” two days before production began, Jane Kaczmarek says, “after all the hairy fat guys didn’t work out.” And Gilligan cast him in “Breaking Bad” because he recalled an episode of “The X-Files” he’d written, in 1998, in which Cranston played a redneck roofer—a part he’d got largely because he auditioned wearing drumstick sideburns and a bushy mustache, which he’d grown to play a redneck mechanic in an indie film called “Last Chance.”
Yet luck is the residue of design and devotion. Cranston wrote and directed “Last Chance,” which starred Robin Dearden, as a birthday gift to her. And he made his “X-Files” role menacing yet memorably sympathetic, giving his racist roofer the trembling hands of someone who’d been picked on in school. Cranston had three Emmy nominations for “Malcolm,” and each time he took out sly “For your consideration” ads promoting his work. “It’s a game, and I know the game,” he explains. “The whole idea is to put yourself in a position to be recognized for your work so opportunities increase. False humility or even laziness could prevent that.”
On “Breaking Bad,” Cranston tried to keep the set free of emotional clutter; his philosophy was, “Let’s save the drama for in front of the cameras.” In an industry where actors average a blowup a day, he had just one in five years, after the writers countermanded the blocking that the actors had worked out for a scene. “It was disrespectful—it was an encroachment into my world,” he says. But all he did in response was state his position firmly and take a long walk. He wrote post-mortem e-mails to the other actors after each season (This year was great, but we can still do better), hosted an annual bowling party for the crew, and made sure everyone showed up to publicize the show at the Television Critics Association conference. Dean Norris, who played Hank, says, “Bryan set the example on set. In the talking-pillow scene”—when Walt’s extended family gathers to encourage him to undergo chemo—“he cried every single time, even when the camera was on one of the rest of us. But he also set the example for how to be a professional, the work ethic. I was more, ‘Ah, fuck this,’ and he told me, ‘You can’t be the “Ah, fuck this” guy. They’re paying you a lot of money, so you need to play your role and be a member of the “Breaking Bad” team. You need to grow up.’ ”
After the third season, Cranston told Gilligan he wanted to be one of the show’s producers. “I wanted it for future credibility,” the actor says. “It is important to me to come across as the leader—I like the power, the empowerment.” Gilligan, who viewed producers’ titles as a writers’ prerogative, was resistant. Cranston explained all that he did: “I am a liaison to the actors and the crew. I travel and give interview after interview—I am a promoting machine. I am the face of the show!” Gilligan looked into it and discovered, he says, that “in large part it was Bryan who was keeping the ship from foundering.” So he acquiesced—just as he had, also reluctantly, when Cranston came to him after the first season and asked to direct an episode. “Bryan was very much the dad of this series,” Gilligan says. “Even I looked to him as the dad.”
For all his geniality, Cranston has a barbed side. One day, he got a call from a nurse at his mother’s assisted-living facility, informing him that his mother, who had Alzheimer’s, had taken up with an equally senescent man, and that they’d “formalized” their relationship. “I know it must concern you greatly to imagine your mother with someone other than your father,” she said. Cranston, whose parents had been married a total of seven times, said that it did, greatly: “What if she gets pregnant?”
Anna Gunn, who played Walt’s wife, grew close to Cranston, and they’d often banter between takes. She recalls, “In the second season, as things got tense between Walt and Skyler, Bryan said some harsh things that made me go, ‘Wow.’ ” After their characters’ new baby, Holly, was born, Cranston would often suggest that Walt be closer to her. “He’d be holding the baby, and he’d go, ‘Yes, that’s right, Holly. Yes! Your mother is cold and doesn’t care,’ ” Gunn says. “Because it was a very male set, where all the men were siding with Walt, the humor would just hit me in the stomach. So I took Bryan aside, feeling a bit like a little girl, and said, ‘I get hurt, because I’m so much my character’s advocate.’ And he said, ‘I am so sorry. My humor can be cutting, and I sometimes forget how vulnerable you can be.’ ”
Cranston says, matter-of-factly, “I often find myself in a pickle and having to apologize, because that’s what risk-takers have to do. In a regular workplace, you’re not supposed to pat someone on the ass. In our world, if you pat someone on the ass or say something crazy, you’re rewarded for it. You’re supposed to get into the character’s deepest feelings.” So he grew fatherly toward his screen children and possessive of his screen wife. When Skyler began sleeping with her boss, Ted Beneke, Cranston says, “I felt jealousy and resentment and anger. I treated Chris Cousins”—who played Ted—“horribly. Good actor and good man, but I didn’t like him. When he arrived in makeup, I’d say, ‘Oh, boy—here’s the asshole.’ ”
At the end of the second season, Walt feels that he is losing Jesse, his true son, to Jesse’s girlfriend, Jane. One night, Walt finds the couple in Jesse’s bed, passed out from using heroin—and then Jane vomits and starts to choke. “Breaking Bad” scripts are unusually dense with stage directions, and the script dictated that Walt, having realized “it serves him better if she keeps CHOKING,” decides not to help her, which prompts “a look of horror, of fear and revulsion.” The scene was intended as a milepost in Walt’s moral decay. In an earlier version, rejected by AMC as too much of a leap, Walt pushes Jane onto her back to make her choke.
Vince Gilligan says, “What you see on film is Walt’s surprise, alarm, then fear, then the realization of opportunity, then sadness and self-loathing, and then acceptance and a hardening of resolve—all in a few seconds. But, great as it was on camera, there was some heat that came off Bryan in the room, something powerful and elusive—almost as if he put it across on the infrared band.”
Cranston says he prepared “by thinking about the pro-and-con list, the way Walt would—about how if Jane dies Jesse stays alive. But in acting you open yourself. And in one of the takes, as I was thinking about how it was someone’s daughter, lying there, I was suddenly looking down at my own daughter’s face. Taylor popped in, and it made me gasp.”
“I gave Bryan a hug afterward,” Anna Gunn says, “and he just grabbed me and held on, crying.” It took him nearly fifteen minutes to stop. “It got him in a place he didn’t expect, a dark place.”
The lines blurred for everyone. When Walt turned his Heisenberg face on Skyler, Gunn almost couldn’t stand it. “It was like something came over the sun, and something would drop in my stomach, and I’d feel so alone and scared and angry,” she says. “I don’t know where he goes, and I don’t want to know.” Rian Johnson, the director of three of the series’ strongest episodes (including the one that airs this Sunday, which Gilligan calls the show’s best), says, “When you talk to Bryan and he’s thinking about a scene, his face gets that Heisenberg look. He says he achieves it just by letting his face go blank, but it bores into you, and I found myself stammering.”
Cranston fixed me with his blank stare to demonstrate that his face is naturally “mean,” and the experience was like a cold walk in the uncanny valley. Jason Alexander, who’s received the Heisenberg from Cranston at the poker table, defined the feeling: “It can be particularly chilling when someone who gives you such joy turns off the source of it. It makes you think, Wait—which one is real?”
Cranston runs for exercise, and every so often he’ll be jogging along and realize that his face is contorted with anger—“rage blasting out of my body, a rush of toxins and rage.” His sister, Amy, says, “He gets a lot of hostility out by running, and it’s always tied back to childhood or his father.” Running releases what remains from acting. “Part of me—of any human being—is really dark,” Cranston told me, in his living room. “And this, with Walt, is how I work through my issues. It’s much easier for me to allow the character to explode than it is for Bryan to open up.” He sat thinking. “I wouldn’t consider myself closed, or open. I’m . . .” He treaded water a moment. “I’m ‘On lunch break; back in an hour.’ ”
As “Breaking Bad” ’s fourth season wound down, Gilligan recalls, “Bryan came to me and said, ‘You really want to end the show?’ ” Cranston believed that they had two seasons left in them, but Gilligan, fearing he’d run out of story, had decided on one. “It was, like, ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ ” Gilligan told me. “I felt I was betraying him.” Cranston admits, “I didn’t want to let go of the greatest experience of my professional life.” At a party after the final episode wrapped, he had the “Breaking Bad” logo tattooed on the inside of his right ring finger.
The interplay between the show’s two fathers kept the story moving. Generally, Gilligan was the architect and Cranston the builder, but it got complicated. Gilligan, who says fear is his creative engine, would bang his head against a wall when he was blocked and, at times, found himself envying Walt’s freedom: “There’s a neurotic wish fulfillment in a cancer diagnosis, how liberating it would be, how it would make your daily worries go away.” And Cranston was building, at times, from his own blueprints; Heisenberg is who he might have turned into if he’d become a cop. In the final season, when Cranston suggested that Walt start womanizing—“If you’re a conquering hero, you grab a wench and say, ‘You’re having sex with me!’ ”—Gilligan wisely let the idea die. When the script had Walt acknowledge that he’d shot his partner, Mike, needlessly, Cranston held up production for an hour because he believed the line would turn Walt into a putz and trivialize Mike’s death. As the sun set over the Rio Grande, Cranston finally uttered the line, but in a dazed way that made Walt not quite responsible for it.
The last creative debate took place over the first episode of the final eight. Walt, realizing that his brother-in-law is on to him, goes to his house to suss him out. After a violent confrontation, in which Hank punches him in the face, he demonstrates what a good liar he’d make on the stand: “I’m a dying man who runs a car wash—my right hand to God, that is all I am.” Bewildered and heartsick, Hank replies, “I don’t even know who I’m talking to.” Walt says, “If that’s true—if you don’t know who I am . . . then maybe your best course would be to tread lightly.”
The scene was written for Walt to unleash his powers, Gilligan says: “We wanted the showmanship of having Heisenberg come out.” But Cranston, who was directing the episode, argued, “Walter knows this discovery has crushed Hank, and he doesn’t want to crush him anymore.” He and Gilligan finally arrived at a way to play the scene. When Hank suggests a reconciliation—why doesn’t Walt bring Skyler and the kids over, and they’ll all talk?—Walt flashes a menacing hint of Heisenberg. “I said, ‘That’s not going to happen,’ ” Cranston told me, and “I let my eyes go dead.” But the “tread lightly” speech ended up being mostly a dying man’s plea to his brother-in-law to remember the relationship that they once had.
The idea was that Walt, having outfoxed Hank, now genuinely pities him, and seeks his pity in return. But Dean Norris says, “When Bryan played it so Walt was really listening to Hank, it was so much scarier—you could see Walt contemplating what it was like to have become a monster, and almost weeping. It was badass and scary and sad, all at the same time, and I wanted to reach out and give him a hug. Bryan’s so transparent in his eyes that people still root for that guy, one of the most evil monsters out there.”
Your conclusion about that scene, and about the final eight, depends on whether you believe that Walt can keep Heisenberg at bay, or whether you suspect that Heisenberg is using Walt as a decoy. Even as the character’s mortality comes knocking, Cranston somehow keeps both narratives—the triumph of the brave, cold dad and of the fearful, warm one—alive. The Walter that he leaves us with, Gilligan says, “isn’t freshwater, and he isn’t seawater. The man is purely brackish.” ♦
