PLUME: What had you been doing up to that time after high school?
CRANSTON: High school was a very confusing time for me. My parents split up in 1968, and so I went through junior high and high school virtually with no father. My father was not in the picture anymore. My mother wasn’t quite up to finding what we’d need… there were just a lot of problems. It was a very, very difficult period of kind of 8 to 10 years in there.
PLUME: And throwing in the inherent insanity of being a teenager anyway.
CRANSTON: Yes, exactly. I was very fortunate, however, to have an older brother, Kyle. He’s two years older than me, and he was going through the same thing, right? I was just smart enough to figure out, “Hey, whatever he’s going through now, I’m about to go through in another year or two. Why don’t I just watch what he does? Whatever works for him, I’ll do. Whatever doesn’t work for him, I won’t do.” I even tell him about it, I said, “Man, you were like my blocking back. You kind of blocked for me. I kept looking to see where you were going, ‘OOH! He ran into a wall – don’t go that way.'” He got involved in a Police Explorers group – the Los Angeles Police Department had a branch of the Boy Scouts called the Police Explorers, and we were in the West Valley then, and my brother got involved in it, thankfully for him, because we didn’t have an opportunity to go on the bad side. Neither one of us got into drugs at all.
PLUME: You were certainly in the right area for it, at the right time.
CRANSTON: Yes, exactly. So he got involved in this Police Explorer group, primarily because he looked for something to do that, perhaps subliminally, would be a father figure replacement. Then he started traveling with this group, for virtually free, virtually no money at all. They went to Japan, they went to Hawaii, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is fantastic!” I had little to no interest in police work, but I wanted to travel. So I joined the group when I was 16. Part of the joining the Police Explorers was that you had to go every Saturday for 8 weeks to the actual police academy, and you had to do kind of a microcosm of what a policeman goes through. Physical training, marching drill, scholastic training, police codes, the whole thing. You had to wear a uniform, had to polish – everything was done like a little policeman. I found out that I was pretty good at this. There were 111 or 112 cadets from all over the city, and I graduated number one in the class. I got my picture in the paper and a trophy. Now all of a sudden, I got more attention again, an accolade. “Hey, look at that. You’re going to be a policeman. That’s terrific. That’s a good career. That’s good, that’s good.” So yeah, “That’s what I’ll do, that’s right, because I’m good at it.” I thought that was the criteria for me, to be good at something. It seemed sensible enough, especially at 16, 17 years old. So when I graduated from high school, I go to L.A. Valley College, because it’s cheap and I have no money. I’m going to do two years there, then transfer if my grades are really good to UCLA or Cal-State North Ridge or some similar university to get a bachelor’s of science degree in police science, because promotions are much easier and the pay scale is higher each step of the way. That was my plan. So at 18 years old I go to Valley College, I take my police science courses, taking them like crazy. I’m doing well, I’m getting A’s all through, I’m like, “This is it. Okay, I’m going to be a policeman. It’s an authority figure, it’s kind of a masculine thing – this is good. People look up to you, some people hate you, that’s okay. I can deal with that.” Well, my first year I did all my major. Every class was about police work of some sort. I was starting my second year, and my counselor there said, “Look, if you want to have your curriculum become attractive to a University, you need to round out your education here and take some fine arts or something.”
PLUME: Something to diversify yourself.
CRANSTON: Yeah, diversify yourself. “Oh, okay.” I look up and look at the big board, and A – acting. I go, “Oh, acting, I did a little bit of that when I was a kid, and I did two plays in grade school, some skits and things. I’ll do acting – that’s fun. Okay, fine, that’ll be good.” So I go to acting class, and what do I find, but beautiful girls. Beautiful girls. The awareness of a 19 year old male is my career choice was then shifted to acting, by virtue of raging hormones of a 19 year old. That’s how I chose what I wanted to do.
PLUME: You’ve got to respect that on some level – you were flexible.
CRANSTON: I was flexible. I’m willing to bend. Exactly! So there I was. Now, I’m totally confused, I finished my two years and they go, “Oh, if you’re going to transfer …” I go, “Transfer to what, to do what? How? I don’t know! I have a two-year degree in police science.” You know, it’s like the brave will stay and fight and the cowards will run away, and so of course, I ran away.
PLUME: Well, there’s sometimes a certain intelligence in running away.
CRANSTON: I was totally confused. My brother and I bought motorcycles and we left the state. We were gone for two years, because he was pretty much in the same boat. He was good at what he was doing. In fact, he passed the Orange County Sheriff’s test, and he literally had to just come down and pick up his badge and his gun, and he’s in and he starts the academy for the Orange County Sheriff. And he just didn’t go down and pick up his gun. I said, “When are you going?” “I don’t know, maybe next week.” “When are you going?” “I don’t know, maybe …” So we finally realized, “You’re hesitating, I’m hesitating. I don’t know either. What should we do? Let’s get out of here!” So we ran away. We bought these motorcycles and threw sleeping bags and tents on them and took off and just drove across the country. I had $175 in my pocket, and gas, and we were camping out wherever we could. We ran out of money in Texas, I think. Got jobs in little cafes – just enough to wash dishes and make a little money and eat something and put some gas in the tank and move on. We also got jobs at a variety of carnivals, working joints. They call them joints, the booths – working joints there. We never stayed long enough to work up to, like, a ride operator – because you’d make more money – because we’d want to move on. Boy, that’s a different lifestyle there, carnival life.
PLUME: I can’t even comprehend it.
CRANSTON: Oh my God! Oh my God!
PLUME: And it’s the kind of thing you can do with a clear conscience, right?
CRANSTON: Yeah, we can. We were pretty much observers by that point. It’s kind of the difference, even though we were working there, we weren’t really in with the regular group, you know what I mean? We were just the day laborers of the work force there, so we weren’t really treated like, “Hey, come on in here, share the bottle.” Which we’re glad about… so we moved on.
PLUME: Was there ever any thoughts of settling down in any one place that you guys stopped in?
CRANSTON: The only place we stopped for a while was in Florida… Daytona Beach, Florida. The reason that was our destination number one is it was getting to be late fall, and it was getting cold – Florida’s warm, it made sense. Secondly, we had cousins who lived in Daytona Beach, Florida, and we mooched off them. We slept on their floor for a while, and while we were broke down there we thought, “You know what, why don’t we stay the winter months? Get jobs down here,” because tourists come down in the winter months. One year, we got jobs working in a Hawaiian restaurant as waiters. Another year, we went and traveled again, came back down, and we got jobs working on pool decks, selling suntan lotion and things like that to tourists. Anything to make a buck, build up some bank account, pay off our debts, and travel again.
PLUME: But at no point did you ever get an urge to settle down anywhere?
CRANSTON: No. No, because I was still restless in my mind. The idea to settle down didn’t come until I knew what I wanted, where I wanted. I know the moment. We were in Daytona Beach and working in the pool decks during the day time, and so I thought, “Hey, you know what? I miss the acting thing from the year I did it at the junior college. I’m going to go over to the local playhouse, the neighborhood playhouse here, and volunteer my services.” I walked in and met a guy there, he said, “Where you from?” I said, “California.” He said, “You ever act before?” He said, “You’re in a play.” I was immediately cast as the King’s right hand man in The King and I. From there, I was in another play right after that, then I produced the third play. Then I produced and directed the fourth play, and all of a sudden I was busy all winter long, even into a little bit of the spring, and still working during the day on the pool decks. So I realized, “Wow, this is fantastic, but I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to travel again.” My brother and I were driving along the Blue Ridge Highway in Virginia – gorgeous, just gorgeous … I think it was a Sunday night or something… it was a Sunday late afternoon, and we were just driving along and it started to rain, so we thought, “You know what? Let’s see if it stops.” We saw a picnic area a while back, and so we went back to the picnic area, and it was actually a driveway a quarter of a mile down to a picnic area, next to a stream. There were two covered picnic roofs with slabs – you know the kind, no walls. We both drove our motorcycles up onto the slabs in the corners, pulled one of the two picnic tables off of the slab, and stayed there. We realized it’s starting to get dark, looks like we’re staying here tonight, we threw our pup tents up and got out our Top Ramen, and that’s what we ate that night. Seven days later, it stopped raining. It didn’t stop raining for a week. Well, it was like being in prison, almost. You look around, you do a 360, and it’s like the rain created bars – because it was streams coming down, constant streams, and it was like bars around you. My brother and I would do push-ups, jumping jacks… we had a routine, just to try to break the monotony. We’d sit down and have breakfast of bullion cubes … we were skinny little rails anyway. And we had our books. We’d read. I had one large book of plays that I was reading, and I’ll never forget one night that five or six hours had actually passed, and I didn’t realize it had gone, because I had gone through one play already, and I was in the middle of Hedda Gabler, of all plays, and I had that epiphany. I had that cognition. It just went, “Bing!” I went, “Oh, so this is what I should do.” Because I was enjoying the books and it made me escape, and I wanted to read it, and I was thinking about playing characters as I’m reading it and things like that. I realized, “So this is the difference. I should seek something that I love, not just what I’m good at. By seeking something that I love, hopefully I either am good at or will become good at it at some point.” That was the difference between the police work, which I was good at but didn’t love, and what I found now. So everything just became crystal clear for me.
PLUME: Was your brother jealous of your epiphany?
CRANSTON: No, because he was kind of having a similar thing. I don’t know if he had the light bulb as sharp as me, but he did have it, and we went back to California.
PLUME: Quicker than you made it out East?
CRANSTON: Yes. We just kind of zipped back to California, but we saw all the states. We saw everything. I put on like 140,000 miles on my motorcycle. We came back to California, and my brother’s always been more patient than I. He went to UCLA, and finished out his two and a half years to get his Bachelor of Arts in Theater Arts, whereas I went to acting classes and hit the streets. I was too impatient, “I don’t want to go to school, I want to act right now. I want to go right now.” So that’s the course I went. Through just maturation and an amalgam of acting teachers along the way throughout the years, you form your own style and your own technique that suits you, that works for you, and then let it loose.
PLUME: So what would this be around ’78 when you made it back?
CRANSTON: Yes, late ’78, about Halloween ’78. I got my SAG card on a movie in January of ’79, because I was working as an extra on a movie Walter Grauman was directing…. Steve Guttenberg was the star of this movie called To Race the Wind. It was about a blind kid who goes to college, and how he succeeds and makes a success of himself and that sort of thing. Ironically, without me knowing it, my wife – we’ve been married for almost 13 years now – she was an actor in that movie. I was just an extra. I don’t know if I ever met her or saw her – I might have seen her, but I didn’t meet her, certainly. But I was hanging around, there was a scene where he’s playing in a football game, an intramural football game, and he was blind. The scene Walter was setting up, “Okay, some kid comes up here, the quarterback says, ‘Hike, hike, hike,’ and passes it. It gets blocked, and it falls in the hands of Steve Guttenberg as the blind guy. He starts running, but he runs the wrong way, and he scores a touchdown for the other team.” So I have a football in my hands, while most if not all of the rest of the extras are sitting under a tree or reading books or whatever. I told myself that I’ll work as an extra up until the point where it becomes too frustrating…. if it gets to the point where I go, “I can’t do this anymore because I need to act and not be cattle.” I studied the vernacular of the set and that whole thing. I was always trying to get as close to the action as possible, without being in the way. So I’m holding this football, and I’m kind of listening as he’s doing this scene. All of a sudden, he looks around, “Okay, so we get some guy, some guy, some guy,” he’s looking around, and he sees me with the football. He goes, “You. Are you an extra?” I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “Come on over here. You’re going to take the ball – you ever play football?” “Yeah, high school.” “Okay, you’re going to take the football, and you’re going to drop back and you’re going to pass it, okay?” He told me the scene, “Okay, let’s rehearse it.” We rehearse the scene, and it was supposed to take place in New England, so of course I attacked my “Hike, hike, hike” – I sounded like a bastardization of the Kennedys… I wanted to be authentic! Of course, I could have been from any other part of the country going to school in New England, but no, I had to be a native of New England.
PLUME: It was the depth you brought to the project.
CRANSTON: Right … that was my first words in a show, in a movie of the week here. Afterward, some guys came in and said, “Hey, man, you spoke some words. You can get in the union now.” I said, “You’re kidding, really?” So I went to the producers, waited until everything was done and they move on to the next scene – they don’t want to go back. They said, “Okay, listen. I’ll tell you what. We will pay you the day rate for an actor and get you in the union, but then you’re off the books. We’re not going to pay you residuals and stuff.” I said, “Fine, fine, that’s fine with me.” I was thrilled. I got in the union, but they forgot to take me off the books. So to this day, I get residuals from To Race the Wind, for 14 cents. Something like that, something definitely under a dollar, and it reminds me of that time, when I got my SAG card.
PLUME: How soon after the first job was the second job?
CRANSTON: I booked a commercial next, I think. I started doing commercials because it was the best waiter’s job I could find. It was great, because it would pay my medical, so I started doing commercials – and over the course from 1979 to ’93 or 4 or 5 or even later, I must have done 75 to 100 commercials. Something like that. I would do a lot of them, I would do a lot of commercials every year, and that would pay my way to acting classes and pictures and resumes and everything that I needed to have as an actor. Plus, it started contributing to the pension, and again, I thank SAG for being formed by that time and having those things. It was great.
PLUME: How fulfilling was commercial work for you?
CRANSTON: It’s not really fulfilling at all. It’s a test, because some commercials are loaded with dialogue and you have to be really on it, and crisp, and enunciate and really sell the product, and sometimes sell the product without selling the product – you know, underplay it or whatever. I would take the same approach I did to any acting job… it was an acting job. Sometimes it was almost like making a little mini-movie, because there would be a sequence of scenes that had a beginning, middle, and end, and those you kind of loved because it had more behind it than just saying, “I love Coffeemate. The reason I do, is because I enjoy …” But you did that because it was money, and you had to make money. You had to survive. I think, also, if you do enough, you survive – but you also subliminally put your face out there. People may not know where they know you from, but you start to develop a familiar face, and that’s what gave me a familiar face to begin with, all the commercials I did.
PLUME: Which, I’m assuming, gives you a heads up in casting sessions.
CRANSTON: You never want to cop to it …
PLUME: But, subliminally on the part of the casting agent, without you having to do anything it makes you stand out from someone who hasn’t had any face time anywhere.
CRANSTON: Right. The producers or directors would look and go, “Yeah, yeah, I know this guy. I’ve seen him before – where have I seen you?” And you only mention any theatrical job, “Well, I just did an episode of CHiPs,” which was one of my first jobs – I think 1980, first theatrical job or something like that. You know, you go on. You get little jobs, and you start working your way up. One-liners here and there on General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, and all these things. You just start doing these things and pretty soon what looks like a piss-poor resume starts to look, “Well, that’s not bad. Well, that’s getting better. That’s pretty good.” You start improving, and working your way to better and better positions. When I first started, I had a goal. My goal was to be a good, working actor. That was my goal. Well, I achieved that, and I was always too humble to say, “I want to be a star.” “Oh come on, it’s not important to be a star. What does that mean, to be a star?” Until I realized what it truly means to an actor, to be a star, and what it means is power and control and opportunities.
PLUME: And stability?
CRANSTON: I guess more stability, yes. It means all of those things. So, instead of putting up a barrier to it, I opened up to it and said, “Okay, if that’s my destiny, then bring it on.” Again, it coincided with that reformatting of my approach to the work like 15 years ago, somewhere in the mid-80s. Like ’85, somewhere in there, is when everything started to change for me and I realized how to approach it.
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