New role in Trumbo proves Brian Cranston is definitely not typecast
WHEN an actor plays a cult character like Walter White in the hit series like Breaking Bad, it’s a hard thing to live down. So when Bryan Cranston enters the room to promote his portrayal of the real life eccentric Dalton Trumbo, “Got any drugs?” is probably the last thing he wants to hear.
Still, the 59 year-old multiple Emmy winner is well used to it and sniggers in an oh-so-familiar deep-voiced way, “I might be able to set you up with some!”
A genial man who is straight postured and looks far younger than hunched-over Walter — a portrayal based on his father — Cranston, a non-smoker and relative clean liver, chain smokes while playing the 1950’s black-listed Hollywood screenwriter. “At the typewriter, in the bathtub or even while eating,” Cranston notes with disgust.
“I thought that smoking was really part of who he was and what killed him eventually. It’s what created that raspy voice and the affectation of the cigarette holder really makes a statement. So I thought I’d smoke herbal cigarettes so I wouldn’t have any nicotine going in and I’d be fine. But I was still ingesting smoke and I was like, ‘Oh my god!’. It was awful!”
POSITIVE ENERGY
The brimming energy Cranston possesses serves his movies well. Invariably he’s the team leader on set, and he likes to create a fun magnanimous mood.
“I like having a set that’s friendly where everybody respects each other. We do the thing, we have a few laughs and then we go home. I don’t like assholes.”
Where does all that manic energy come from? “I’m crazy,” he responds in a light voice as if confiding a secret.
Cranston concedes there was a little craziness in Walter White, who “was pushed against the wall in his own mind when he found out he was dying”.
Rather he says, there was a wild eccentricity in Trumbo, a communist who defied the 1950s ban imposed by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to write the screenplays for Roman Holiday, Spartacus and Exodus under a pseudonym.
Trumbo couldn’t even claim credit when he won Oscars for Roman Holiday and The Brave One and for a period was driven into poverty and spent 11 months in prison.
“He went to jail not because he committed a crime but because he didn’t respond in a way the committee wanted him to,” Cranston says.
Incredibly, we have heard little about the man, until now as seasoned comedy director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers trilogy, Meet the Parents) gives the writer his due. Cranston wanted that all-important first leading role after his hit series to be special and his portrayal as Hollywood’s unsung hero fits the bill. He has been nominated for a best actor Oscar for his efforts.
“It’s a sweet little movie which has a really important message and that’s what captured my attention,” he says.
“When I first read it I thought this is about embracing someone else’s opinion you may not agree with. We’re living with that now, regarding sexual orientation or whatever, there are social issues that will always come up that we may not personally agree with but that’s not the point. The point is allowing that other person to have a voice and, as Trumbo says to John Wayne, ‘We both have the right to be wrong’.”
Wayne, Edward G Robinson and a gutsy Kirk Douglas all played prominent roles in Trumbo’s life, as did Hedda Hopper, the right-wing gossip columnist who was out to get him.
“Trumbo joined the American Communist Party but the truth is he was not a communist, he was a socialist,” says Cranston. “He loved being rich. But he didn’t know how to handle money. He’d give it away or he’d spend it. He loved the newest typewriter, ‘I need it, the newest car let’s get it, let’s buy a ranch, let’s build a lake’. He had big thoughts, big ideas and big debt.”
One of the film’s most enduring images is of him writing in the bathtub. “He had a bad back from abusing himself for so long. He thought, ‘I’ve got to soak my back so I can continue writing but I don’t want to waste that time’. So that’s why he set up the whole thing so he could soak his back and work. He was still smoking and answering the phone.”
At the time Trumbo was at the height of his powers and in many ways he was a workaholic. Cranston recognises some comparisons with himself. “I work hard and I work a lot. His real interest was the work and I’m a bit like that.”
They are also big family men. Trumbo adored his daughter Nikola (Elle Fanning) as Cranston dotes on his daughter, Taylor, 22, his only child with his actress wife Robin Dearden whom he met on the 1980s series Airwolf.
FAMILY ISSUES
The seemingly cool Californian speaks little about his early life. In a recent issue of Playboy he explained how he was an introvert in school due to a “bad situation at home”.
“‘My father disappeared when I was 11, and I didn’t see him again until I was 22. My mother was an alcoholic.” His father Joe was an aspiring actor and former amateur boxer who died in 2014.
Understandably Cranston is a little guarded these days after playing one of TV’s most beloved anti-heroes. “I’m still negotiating fame though I’m not very comfortable with that in the sense that I’m more comfortable when I’m working,” he says.
“When I’m not working and at home I have a far less tendency to go out. I’ve become a little more reclusive. I just find the conversation different. If we met on the street and we were waiting for a bus and we were talking about the weather or something — I now long for that conversation. In an airport I mainly look for older people and sit by them. They have less of an opportunity of recognising me.”
Despite probably this one and only drawback, Breaking Bad created a huge range of opportunities for the actor. “I greatly appreciate that,” he says of his film roles in the likes of Argo, Godzilla, Rock of Ages, Total Recall, Contagion and Drive.
He is not keen to return to Walter White. If he were ever to revisit a character it would be Hal from Malcolm in the Middle, the series that is getting a rerun on Comedy Central. “It would be fun to play that adorable, sweet and clueless guy who is afraid of everything,” he says.
Cranston will soon appear with James Franco in In Dubious Battle, based on John Steinbeck’s tale of fruit workers fighting for their rights in California; and the duo also collaborate on studio comedy Why Him?. He teams up with Roach again for the HBO movie All the Way where the actor reprises his 2014 Tony-award winning role as Lyndon B Johnson.
It’s clear from the amount of good projects he’s being offered that Cranston is at the height of his powers.
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