SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, union actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. This interview was conducted prior to the strike.
Bryan Cranston has a system. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Bryan Cranston has many systems, which in aggregate form might be termed the Cranston Method – an interconnected series of criteria and organising principles for life. These include the four things you need to be a successful actor (talent, patience, persistence and luck), which are separate from the four things you need to be a good actor (still talent, but also curiosity, vulnerability and imagination). Before taking on a new role, Cranston famously assesses it using what he calls the Cranston Assessment of Project Scale (CAPS), a five-item list of subjects – story, script, role, director and cast – which are each given a numerical score. The total must add up to at least 13 for him to consider taking the job.
The Method has other uses. In his early 20s, Cranston took a two-year motorcycle trip with his brother, during which he had the epiphany that he wanted to be an actor and not a law enforcement official, the career that he’d been studying for. While planning their itineraries, Cranston triangulated the locations of women he and his brother had already hooked up with to create routes where they’d most likely encounter someone who’d give them a free place to stay. The cartographical method was called GIDGT: the Geographically Incredibly Desirable Girlfriend Tour.
“I’ll be honest with you,” Cranston says, sitting in a booth in Manhattan’s Empire Diner, when I note his penchant for schematics. “I never realised I had patterns like that.” Then he begins to enumerate the reasons he’s currently moving from Central Park South to a new place on Central Park West. “There are six…”
The catalogues, which Cranston handwrites, are meant to help him remain objective while making the decisions that have led him here: from acting in commercials and the soap opera Loving, to Seinfeld, Malcolm in the Middle, Argo, Trumbo and Breaking Bad. They represent what might be a central principle of the Cranston Method: consideration. Another might be preparedness.
His current job is starring in and producing Your Honor, a series about a judge who is forced to abandon most of his ethical and professional ideals to protect his son after he accidentally kills another child, whose father is an organised-crime leader. To ready himself for the role, he sat in on jury selections and trials, watching justices whose styles ranged from head-down note-taking to flamboyant imperiousness, to calibrate how he would preside over his own fictional courtroom.
Your Honor is Cranston’s most widely seen television role since Breaking Bad, on which – as anyone reading this will already be aware – Cranston played chemistry-teacher-cum-drug-lord Walter White. Cranston’s virtuosic performance came from care so punctilious, there is nearly an entire chapter in his enjoyable 2016 memoir A Life in Parts dedicated to a fight between himself and his beloved -showrunner Vince Gilligan. Cranston wanted to have a single line removed from the script because he felt it betrayed White’s values. When Cranston watched himself deliver it in the episode, he wrote, “It pained me.” (The line was, “I just realised that Lydia has the names. I can get them from her.”)
Jason Schwartzman and Cranston’s Breaking Bad co-star Bob Odenkirk both recite to me, nearly verbatim, Cranston’s filming day routine, which they have each adapted into their own acting bible. “I get up at 5:30,” Schwartzman begins, in character as Cranston. “I have a coffee, shower. I’m on set by six-whatever. It’s eight minutes away. I get there, I’m in the makeup trailer by seven, shaving my head. I go to work. Then, I put hot towels on my head and face and let the character soak out of me until the towels are cold.” Odenkirk finishes the day: “After lunch sometime, ask the caterers to make you a sandwich for dinner, because you won’t have time to go out to dinner or even make dinner when you get home. So get food, and then when you’re done, you take the food and you go home and eat it and you study your lines for the next day.”
Cranston’s co-stars talk about his meticulousness and ability to transform in and out of character with near reverence: “I learned the most about acting from acting in a room with Bryan Cranston,” Odenkirk says.
Cranston brought the same focus to the somewhat less intense set of Wes Anderson’s new film Asteroid City. During periods where he wasn’t working, Cranston sat in a chair taking notes on a legal pad, pages and pages, so much text that Schwartzman says it looked like he was working on a book. When he asked Cranston what he was writing, he said, “Oh, it’s just ideas.” On camera, Cranston would respond to Anderson’s directions with more specificity than Schwartzman had seen from any other actor.
“I feel bad because, if only we could all be at that level,” Schwartzman says. “I feel like Wes is like, ‘Ahhh. Phew, thank you. Finally, this is what I’m talking about.’”
Anderson says, “Most actors are focusing on what their task is: their performance. But Bryan is one of the ones who can’t help but think about the whole project, and so he’s often very helpful as an adviser on the work as a whole. Also, I love him.”
Cranston is more than happy to detail the rigours of his preparation but repelled by bragging about their outcomes – he says he gets asked all the time if Breaking Bad is the best show ever made. “I think it’s a little arrogant to step into that conversation,” he says. “Let it be what it is.” (Anderson calls Cranston’s work on the series “one of the great performances in any medium.”)
Still, Cranston realises the impact of the show, and the status it has afforded him. When I ask him where his baseball cap is from, he realises he doesn’t know where he got it and turns it over, looking for a label. When none reveals the brand, he leans forward and raises his eyebrows, earnestly bringing me into his confidence to explain how a person like Bryan Cranston winds up owning a hat without provenance. “As a celebrity –,” he begins to say before being interrupted by my outburst of laughter. Cranston continues, playing off my reaction, “…you can start every sentence with ‘as a celebrity.’”
One of the joys of watching Cranston is the seriousness of his delivery colliding with the ridiculousness of that seriousness, and the delicious tension of discerning whether Cranston – or whoever he’s playing – is aware of it. (Today, this effect is amplified by a glorious moustache.) During our conversation, Cranston veers from introspection into showmanship so frequently and loudly that it appears almost anyone who didn’t clock him when he arrived is now aware of his presence.
Few actors are able to simultaneously convey such authority and silliness. “You definitely feel like this guy’s not gonna be fucking around once they say ‘action’,” Odenkirk says. “He will be fucking around as soon as they say ‘cut’.”
(“I don’t know,” their co-star Aaron Paul says. “There are a lot of times where we were rolling and he was kind of fucking [around]. On Breaking Bad, out of nowhere, he was meant to present me with a gun, but then he pulled out a water gun shaped like a penis and started squirting me with it.”)
That ability that Cranston has – to code-switch between arm-flailing comedy one moment and sociopathic menace the next – is why he may be the only person alive who could have played both Malcolm’s Hal and Walter White. It also stems from his sheer commitment to the moment: Cranston is true to the circumstances, whether speed-walking in Spandex through an episode of Malcolm in the Middle or watching a meddlesome Breaking Bad character choke on her own vomit; expounding on the virtues of craft or being a goofball.
His Asteroid City co-star Scarlett Johansson says, “I always assumed he might be a self-aggrandising, actor-y actor, but he’s the complete opposite of that. He comes across as reserved and almost shy in person, completely unassuming – like he isn’t quite sure how he got there. And then the minute he’s performing, all of that humility melts away.”
Cranston likes to say that no one’s interested in a story about a nice man doing nice things; every protagonist needs to have that one thing barring them from their goals. When I relay that Cranston’s own seeming niceness poses a challenge for me, storytelling-wise, and that it would be helpful if he had some complicating personal issues, he appears appalled. “I don’t want the obstacle in my real life,” Cranston says. “You want to be obstacle-free in real life. But it takes work to notice when an obstacle is forming.”
He offers an example, unprompted, about Robin Dearden, his wife of 34 years. “My wife and I have been going to therapy together since before we were married,” he says. “I look at it like the warning light going off on your dashboard. It’s telling you, ‘You might want to pay attention to this.’ I love my wife, and we want to go the distance, but I want to do it in a healthy way. I don’t want to just be with her. I don’t want to just have the two of us go into a restaurant and no one says a word.”
Therapy has helped Cranston recognise his own flaws and to be aware of his own mistakes. When he’s unable to divert his peevishness, he says, “My wife is so sensitive and so beautiful and lovely, and she gets her little feelings hurt and she’s just quiet. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ve wounded a bird. Oh man.’” He has learned to be “pretty free in saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”
After Cranston found his first bout of stable acting work on Loving, an ex-girlfriend with substance abuse issues began stalking him, showing up at the set and threatening to have him killed. Cranston called the police because his fantasies about bashing the woman’s head into the brick wall of his Upper West Side studio apartment became so vivid, he was afraid he’d actually do it. “Nothing -happened in that apartment, but everything had changed,” he wrote in A Life in Parts. “I understood clearly, without question, that I was capable of taking a life. I understood that given the right pressures and -circumstances, I was capable of anything.” The point being that Cranston’s diligent serenity is a choice, and an effortful one.
Before Cranston signs someone onto a project he’s producing, he goes to their IMDb and makes a list of all the people he knows who have worked with the person, then calls them. This is to help ensure a good working environment; by now, Cranston has a big enough Rolodex to be able to vet almost anyone. “It rewards good behaviour, and I like doing that,” he says. (It also rewards Cranston; his Isle of Dogs co-stars Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray and Bob Balaban all vouched for the five-star experience of living in a luxury hotel and shooting a live-action film with Wes Anderson.)
Cranston has felt compelled to get someone fired for bad behaviour only once: a crew member on the set of Breaking Bad. “He was incredibly inappropriate and inebriated, and he made a lot of people on our show feel very uncomfortable. And when I went in to talk to my producer about it and said, ‘We’ve got to let him go. We’ve got to fire him. It’s inexcusable behaviour,’ he said, ‘It’s already done.’” This might be considered another tenet of the Cranston Method: don’t be an arsehole.
This compulsion to tabulate, to organise and categorise, is partly about control. “I’m a list maker, an orderly-minded person,” Cranston says. “I believe it stems from a disorderly childhood, which had a negative impact.” Cranston’s father was an aspiring star, then a failed star, who left his mother for another woman when Cranston was 11, after which their Los Angeles home was foreclosed upon. Cranston’s mother became an alcoholic, eventually remarrying twice more before dying of Alzheimer’s. Following his parents’ breakup, Cranston was sent to stay with his grandparents. The house was adjacent to a chicken farm, where one of Cranston’s chores was slaughtering the animals. When he moved back in with his mother a year later, he took odd jobs like working for a house painter who had him throw fish corpses into the AC duct of a client with a delinquent account.
After he returned from the motorcycle trip with his brother, committed to becoming an actor, Cranston spent the 1980s doing ad work and taking weekly classes with revered Los Angeles improv coach Harvey Lembeck. (One of his fellow students: Robin Williams.) The panic of going on stage with no clue what was going to happen was clarifying; it made auditions and performances Cranston could prepare for, he says, feel like, “This is nothing. I know exactly what I want to do, and I can do it.”
Cranston eventually reconciled with his father after 10 years of estrangement. When Cranston started making serious money, during the six-year run of Malcolm, his father began requesting loans that would never be repaid. “That action prevented us from the possibility of -reestablishing a relationship, a healthy one of father-son,” Cranston says. “It was almost like I was the father, he was coming to me and I was helping him. ‘What do you need this for?’ I would say to him. He’d promise that was the last time he would do it. His ship was going to come in.” This continued until his father’s death in 2014.
At one point, Cranston offered to finance a film for his father to write, which Cranston and his brother would collaborate on. He said no, citing another work-in-progress that he hoped to produce with $15 million of outside funding. (The money never came through.) “His ego was in full command, and it ran his life,” Cranston says. “When he rejected that offer, I realised, ‘Oh, that’s a bigger thing to him than actually being with his sons.’ So I wasn’t resentful, but I was hurt by it. It was like he showed his true colours that day. And I was like, ‘This is where he is. This is his capability. And that’s all that I’m going to get from him.’”
Cranston’s daughter, Taylor, is an actor and has also so far declined to let her father help her career. “She’s very independent,” Cranston says, “and very conscientious of not having any association or hint thereof of nepotism.” His younger co-stars, however, seem happy to absorb whatever excess paternal energy Cranston emits. On the set of Breaking Bad, Cranston took the role of Aaron Paul’s mentor. In an effort to better play the drug-dealing and -abusing Jesse, Paul – then a self-described method actor – found himself in “dark alleyways and bad parts of town, trying to just really feed that beast inside of me.” But Cranston never seemed to let Walter White infiltrate him off the clock. One day, Paul recalls, Cranston told him, “It’s okay to just wash off the makeup and let it go for a moment, you know? It’s okay.” The advice freed Paul to start working in a different way – a way that appeared to assist Cranston in his career longevity. “There’s more to life,” Paul says.
Three years after the series ended, Cranston suggested they work together again. Paul thought it was “too soon” to collaborate on screen but suggested they start a mezcal company, Dos Hombres, because the liquor suited both of their differing alcohol preferences. (Paul says Cranston “doesn’t like to taste his spirit,” while Cranston says Paul likes things that are drunk out of a “paper bag”.) Cranston is godfather to Paul’s son; today is his birthday, and Cranston is planning to phone them later. “It is truly answering a call,” Cranston says, proudly. “It is truly allowing me to go through the experience of what it feels like to be a grandfather. My jaws hurt from [smiling]. I love to hold him and play with him.”
“He’s not like this wise teacher, but what’s so cool about him is that he can be if you want that,” Schwartzman says. “I don’t think it’s [that] he is fatherly. I think that people feel like they can be son-erly.”
Part of that is Cranston’s desire to take care of other people. His Asteroid City co-stars Schwartzman, Hope Davis and Adrien Brody all independently bring up a party that Cranston threw on the set. Davis says, “It wasn’t his movie, right? It’s a huge ensemble movie, and yet he threw this beautiful party for everyone at the end because he’s a gentleman, and he likes to make a good time.” Cranston stood behind the bar pouring margaritas. “He made every single drink for everyone that night,” Schwartzman says. “He wasn’t at the party, he worked the party.” Rather than creating an event to centre himself as host, Cranston invisibly upheld the community values of Anderson, the actual chief. “This is why we all live together,” Schwartzman says of staying in the same hotel while filming Anderson’s movies. “It’s for this kind of thing.”
(Don’t read this paragraph if you want to watch Your Honor but haven’t yet.)
In the climactic scene of the first season’s finale, Cranston’s character’s son is murdered and he winds up sobbing over his body. Cranston was directing the episode; the death took place during a celebration featuring hundreds of background actors. “He was telling stories, and everybody was gathered around him, and everybody was laughing,” Davis says. “I think for the couple of hundred extras who were in the room, it was one of the most fun days they’d ever had on the set.” When the cameras started rolling, she says, “He’d be on the floor with his bleeding son in his arms screaming, ‘Help me!’ and then he’d wait another beat, and then he’d yell, ‘And cut!’” He was working the party.
Cranston is now at a rarefied point in his career. At 67 years old, he has almost certainly created his masterpiece. Breaking Bad won him no less than six Emmy Awards, and has inspired such devotion from admirers that he still has a storage unit full of original fan art, and a gallery of Heisenberg tattoos on his phone. (Goldblum, Cranston’s co-star in Asteroid City and another frequent subject of novelty inkings, tells me that if he ever decided to get tattooed, his first would be of Cranston.)
There likely isn’t going to be another character like Walter White in his oeuvre, or anyone else’s for that matter. That fact could make another actor feel like his greatest work is behind him. “I don’t think of that,” Cranston says firmly.
After Breaking Bad ended, Cranston told his agents he wouldn’t -consider television roles for three years. “I’m in a very, very opportune position where I don’t have to work,” Cranston says. But he is not short of job offers.
“I think he sees from a bit further away than most people,” says Odenkirk with the perspective of someone who has likewise concluded the role of a lifetime. “He’s watched careers and he’s watched them up close, and he’s seen actors up close. He knows you gotta ride the various waves that come and go. Nothing’s gonna beat Walter White for world impact. It’s like Captain Kirk, you know? So what do you do with that? Well, you don’t get all upset about the fact that it’s that important to people and that it will always be. You find your way into other projects that are worthy, and you don’t keep insisting on the same degree of respect and attention that Breaking Bad brought you for each project… And if they’re good projects, you do ’em and you feel proud of ’em. You don’t get mad that they’re not all Breaking Bad.”
Rather than anticlimactic, Cranston has chosen to find life freeing after Breaking Bad. New projects still need to meet the same exacting standards on his CAPS scale, but having an existing legacy of seminal, pop culture-defining art let him add a new criterion to the equation: “How can I challenge myself next?”
“I don’t need a job,” Cranston says. “I don’t want a job. But I love to work. And there’s a big distinction between the two.” Cranston tells me about a musical he wants to produce and star in; he is working with the creators’ estates to make it happen. It still might not. “I don’t want to just put a coat of paint on an old chestnut,” he says. “I’ve got to scrape it down to the bare wood and really make it shine. It’s got to pop. It’s got to be something special.”
He describes another time he had to decide whether a play was something special. This one was produced in Los Angeles, and Cranston wasn’t sure if it was ready to take to New York. “A friend of mine said, ‘It’s good enough for Broadway,’” Cranston says. “He wasn’t wrong.” It just wasn’t good enough for Cranston to go to Broadway with it.
But then, the Cranston Method works because it can be refined, its calculations modified when new variables arise. Cranston tells me about a film he starred in a few years ago with James Franco called Why Him? He’d been wanting to do a comedy and fortuitously received the script from writer-director John Hamburg. But when he read it, it was… okay. Silly. Slight. “You know my scale,” he says of his CAPS system. “It didn’t make the scale. And why? Because I value story very highly, and that story was ‘Midwestern dad doesn’t like his daughter’s boyfriend.’ That was it! That was the story. What’s there? There’s nothing there.” Hamburg had done I Love You, Man, and Cranston knew its lead, Paul Rudd. So he called him. “Can you help me out?” he asked. “The script is really thin. What do you do?” He says Rudd told him, “This is the way most of them are. All those light comedies that I do, they’re fun as shit. I just love doing them because I have so much fun.”
It was another epiphany for Cranston: “It’s okay to do something just for fun.” Not having fun because you’re trying to keep the mood right on a rigorous set, or fun to remove a mounting obstacle, or fun because you’ve been doing too much dramatic work. Just fun.
After Asteroid City, Cranston will appear in Argylle, a film directed by Matthew Vaughn, alongside Samuel L. Jackson and Bryce Dallas Howard. He’ll hopefully also do the musical and the Malcolm in the Middle reunion project the show’s creator Linwood Boomer approached him about. “I’m curious about that family 20 years later,” Cranston says. “What happened to them? Where are they? What are the kids doing? They’re grown men now.” There will be no Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad revival – certainly nothing scripted. “They wanted to do a Breaking Bad 15-year reunion,” Cranston says. “And I thought, ‘In a quick five years from now we’re going to do the 20 and then the 25, then the…’ It’s like, let’s not try to do too much.”
Then, in 2026, one of the greatest actors of this era will retire – at least temporarily. Cranston is planning to shut down his production company, sell his half of Dos Hombres, and abscond with Dearden to a foreign country, probably France, for a minimum of six months. “I want to change the paradigm once again,” he says. “For the last 24 years, Robin has led her life holding onto my tail. She’s been the plus one, she’s been the wife of a celebrity. She’s had to pivot and adjust her life based on mine. She has tremendous benefit from it, but we’re uneven. I want to level that out. She deserves it.”
They’re going to live in a small village and learn the language and how to cook and grow a garden. He will be 70 years old.
“I want to have that experience,” Cranston says. “I want to go for day trips and have the fire in the fireplace and drink wine with new friends and not read scripts. It’s not going to be like, ‘Oh, I’ll read and see what I’m going to do.’ No, it’s a pause. It’s a stop. I won’t be thinking about [work]. I’m not going to be taking phone calls.”
Cranston imagines Dearden sitting with a copy of Little Women and himself finally reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick – just finding new things to talk about over dinner.
Then the other Cranston imagines himself in France, and suddenly he’s a villager in Beauty and the Beast, greeting Belle with an armload of baguettes as she passes on the street. “Bonjour, mademoiselle!” Cranston bellows, taking brows up and lip corners down until his face is a mask of cartoon Frenchness. The moustache seems to go from projecting distinguished virility to the top half of a Van Dyke. “Sacré bleu!” he says, fucking around now.
“It’s about taking a chance,” he says of blowing up his current, enviable life. “I’m used to that feeling – of not knowing.”
If Cranston has calculated how retiring and moving to France scores on his scales, he doesn’t say.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Paola Kudacki
Styling by Angelo Mitakos
Grooming by Rheanne White
Tailoring by Thao Huynh
Set Design by Caz Slattery
See Bryan Cranston at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 19-21 July, in association with BMW UK. For more info and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com