(Page 4 of 5)
In 2007, if you needed an actor to dramatize so profound a transformation, Bryan Cranston would have seemed an unlikely choice. Before “Breaking Bad,” he was known as the dad in “Malcolm in the Middle,” a broadly comic role. When Gilligan told AMC executives that he wanted Cranston to play Walter, they initially were baffled. Then Gilligan explained that years earlier, he cast Cranston in an episode of “The X-Files.” “We had this villain, and we needed the audience to feel bad for him when he died,” Gilligan said. “Bryan alone was the only actor who could do that, who could pull off that trick. And it is a trick. I have no idea how he does it.”
Meeting Bryan Cranston only deepens the mystery. He is Walter’s opposite. The character is coiled and burdened, while Cranston in person is buoyant. Walter’s default facial expression is a rictus of angst, while Cranston’s is a mischievous smile. Cranston looks at least five years younger than the character, and his co-stars say, he often behaves like a 10-year-old. Aaron Paul described Cranston as “a kid trapped in a man’s body.” Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler, Walter’s wife, says that she has never seen an adult more amused by stuffing fruit down his pants. But Cranston’s performance as Walter White has made history, winning three Emmys in a row for outstanding lead in a drama series, the first actor to do so since Bill Cosby in “I Spy” in the mid-’60s.
“Physically, to create Walter White, I use my dad,” he said one night over dinner. “My dad is 87 years old. I’m not going to dodder, but Walter is always a little hunched over, never erect. The message to the audience is that the weight of the world is on this man’s shoulders.”
Cranston is from the total-commitment school of acting, and he once famously did a scene in “Malcolm in the Middle” while covered head to toe with bees. When Gilligan declined to fill in large holes in Walter’s back story, Cranston sat down and wrote out one of his own. On a handful of occasions, he has flagged lines in the script that felt false to him. Cranston reads each episode about a week in advance so that these bumps can be smoothed over before it’s time to start shooting. When he can’t resolve the issue with the writer on the set that week, a call is placed to Gilligan, who is usually in the writer’s room in Burbank. “It’s up to them, but I won’t bend unless I’m convinced it’s the right thing to do,” Cranston says. “Convince me and I’ll do it. I have a theory — our job isn’t to lie to the audience, our job is to find the truth in the character. If we lie, we’re giving the audience a little pinch of poison. They won’t even know they ingested it. But if you lie again and again and again, all of a sudden, your audience is going, ‘This isn’t working for me.’ They just feel sick, and they turn you off.”
Cranston has found many nuanced ways to enact Walt’s many miseries, the most wrenching of which was the loss of his wife’s love. There is a long history in art of foisting suffering on characters who sin, but it seems to have fallen out of favor. As awful as Tony Soprano was, it’s left purposefully unclear at the end of “The Sopranos” whether he paid the ultimate price. Or consider the “simple chaos” take on the universe as represented in movies by Woody Allen, a director whom Gilligan admires. “And Woody Allen may be right,” Gilligan says. “I’m pretty much agnostic at this point in my life. But I find atheism just as hard to get my head around as I find fundamental Christianity. Because if there is no such thing as cosmic justice, what is the point of being good? That’s the one thing that no one has ever explained to me. Why shouldn’t I go rob a bank, especially if I’m smart enough to get away with it? What’s stopping me?”
On a cloudless day in May, five members of the cast and a scrum of crew members were shooting in what is referred to as “the Schrader house,” the home of Walter’s in-laws, Hank and Marie Schrader. It’s rented from a local couple and sits in the shadows of the type of steep, reddish mountains that Wile E. Coyote tumbled off chasing the Road Runner. Gilligan was the ringmaster of this circus, standing on the balcony and sipping a jumbo-size and constantly refilled McDonald’s container of unsweetened iced tea, which he calls brain juice. He was wearing what turned out to be his first pair of designer jeans. They were acquired during a recent shopping spree urged upon him by his girlfriend of 20 years, Holly Rice. His go-to pants have been $12 Wal-Mart jeans, he said, which is what he wore the following day.
He watched as a crew member put a series of sunglasses on the face of a 20ish Latino man with a nonspeaking background role.
“I like that one,” he said when the first pair of dark wraparounds were put on the actor’s face.
On went the second. “Not as good as the first,” Gilligan said.
Then the third. “Not as good as the first,” Gilligan repeated.
A fourth. “Let’s go with the first.”
This, it turns out, is an abbreviated version of a process that Gilligan goes through with virtually every article of clothing, every choice of color, every prop and every extra who appears in “Breaking Bad.” “You see this shirt?” said Dean Norris, who plays Hank Schrader, as he sat on the veranda between takes. He spoke in a stage whisper, out of the side of his mouth, like an inmate describing a warden who has gone insane. “Vince had to see five versions of it before he chose it. Five different shades of a gray T-shirt. That’s unique,” he said, heading into the house. “That’s beyond.”
David Segal is a reporter for the Business section of The New York Times. His most recent article in the magazine was about the New York Cosmos. Editor: Adam Sternbergh (a.sternbergh-MagGroup@nytimes.com)
