[ed. I started watching Breaking Bad several weeks ago while house-sitting at my kids' place - six episodes the first night. It's that good. After re-starting my Netflix account just to continue the saga, I'm now up to episode 56. I wouldn't say Bryan Cranston is the second coming of Marlon Brando, but he does an admirable job as Walter White (meek chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin). And everyone else in the series is first rate, too. Spoiler alert: if you haven't seen the show, you might not want to read this review.]
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.”
by Tad Friend, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ian Wright
