By Ashleigh Stevenson and James Mottram
Could you possibly imagine anyone else playing Walter White from Breaking Bad? Well it could have easily been someone else playing those iconic roles if Bryan Cranston did not take up that acting class that put him on the path to becoming one of TV’s best loved characters.
Speaking with FilmInk about his new movie Last Flag Flying, Cranston revealed that he thought about a different career path during high school. “I was going to possibly enlist in the service out of high school. The army was going to be something to do, to learn more, to travel. The idea of going to war was never a reality to me even though I was in my first year of high school and they still had the draft.” He then explained that after the military, he would look to become a police officer. “I would do that for four years until I was old enough to get into the Los Angeles Police Department…” But a simple acting class that he took in college had changed his mind “…because ummm girls. That’s right, womankind has saved me.”
Last Flag Flying is the latest film from Richard Linklater (Boyhood), who Cranston had never worked with before, but was excited to do so. “I enjoy watching his movies because they’re about something,” he tells us. “Even if it’s a small something. His films allow you, the viewer, to invest in the characters, and that’s what I love to do.”
In the film, Cranston plays a Vietnam vet who teams up with two of his army buddies to bury one of their sons, who fell in Iraq. “He’s a functioning alcoholic, self-medicating to deny or suppress the PTSD,” says Cranston about his character. “It takes a lot for a man to admit a defect in his personality or character makeup or that he was traumatised. That’s why the post-traumatic stress men are ‘oh I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m good, I’m good, I’ll fix myself, I’ll do it myself’ and how they end up doing it themselves sometimes is the problem. Mueller [Laurence Fishburne] goes to God to find himself, to try and fix himself, one [Steve Carell] pays penance by going to prison, ‘I deserve it’; it’s like each one in their own way dealt with their stress.”
Along with Last Flag Flying, at the time of our chat, Cranston was about to star in the play Network, for National Theatre, based on the classic 1976 film of the same name. The screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky has been adapted for today by Lee Hall, but according to Cranston the story about the media world has never been more relevant.
“We’re talking about fake news, talking about the power of television, which we can equate now to the power of smartphones. We’re experiencing everything through here [points to his phone] and “I wanna buy that” and “I wanna buy this” and it’s like life is going on around you. That’s the message. [Howard Beale is] a great character, the madman of the airwaves, he’s like the prophet of television and telling people to turn off their TVs. ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’, I mean…. It’s iconic.”
Last Flag Flying is in cinemas now. Read our review here.
