PLUME: Was there any point prior to that re-prioritization that you were becoming frustrated and entertained any thoughts of just chucking it?
CRANSTON: No. No, I knew early on, and I probably turned off a few dates by it, because when you’re going on a new date and you’re talking – “So, you’re an actor,” and some dates, “So, how long you going to give it before you try something else?” I knew as soon as they said that, they’re not for me. They would often say that, not knowing that it was – it wasn’t really offensive, it was just coming from a standpoint of civilian life. I call anybody who’s not an actor or in our business a civilian, because it’s so strange to everybody outside of our work, to know this area and to know what drives us and what we desire, and that we’re willing to put up with so-called rejections and the insecurity and instability of the whole thing. Why do we keep doing it? “Why do you keep bashing your head against the wall? Why don’t you just go get a job at the post office? Why don’t you get a job, a civil service job – what are you doing?”
PLUME: Like joining the foreign legion.
CRANSTON: Yeah, “You’re 35 years old now. Oh my God, you’re 40 years old, you don’t have a regular job. What’re you going to do for retirement?” This is something that actors struggle with and deal with from their families all the time, and their friends. The true friends who are worried, that’s fine. The other friends, who you think are friends, are the ones who say, “So, what, are you going to be a star? Is that right? Going to be a big TV star?” Those kind of people that I had in my life started getting cut out of my life, because they’re not really your friends. They don’t want to see you succeed, so I just kind of let them go and move on … some people I guess are just miserable, and want everybody else to feel that way. I don’t know. I knew early on, once I had that epiphany in 1978 … I realized that I’m going to be an actor. If it meant I’m going to live in a bachelor apartment for the rest of my life, then that’s what it meant. That’s what I want to be, an actor … I had no financial goal whatsoever, I only had my own satisfaction goal, that I want to be a good, working actor. I want to be able to make a living as an actor, and that was it.
PLUME: What would you think, looking back, would be what you considered your first big role? How would you even define a big role?
CRANSTON: Well, I think the thing that really changed, in 1983 – March of ’83 – I moved to New York and did a movie of the week. One of the stars of a movie of the week, and it spun off into a daytime series called Loving, on ABC. That was my first contract role with anything. Up until then, I’d been doing little co-starring roles and this and that and the other – Hill Street Blues, all these little things. Little pops of things, and more commercials and industrial films and stuff. I was working. And, because I kept my nut low, I was surviving as an actor. But this was it. It was 1983, and meant I moved to New York and started working on a daily basis on a soap opera. It was one of the toughest work situations I’ve had – the demand of it if you want to do really good work. It’s one of the hardest things an actor can do, not because of the quality of it, but because of the quantity. The amount of content is just overwhelming, that in order to do good work, it requires you to not get complacent, and that’s the big test.
PLUME: Do you think your background in commercials helped to speed that along, being able to find what you want and do it in a reasonable amount of time?
CRANSTON: I think, yeah. The cumulative experience to that point helped me, propelled me through that time. I remember early on, though, when we first started working, I would come home with a headache, nightly, because I would memorize the lines verbatim – because that was how I was taught. I was telling that to one of our old cast mates who was older than I was, and he said, “Oh, don’t do that. Just get the gist, just get the meaning across.” He said, “And by the way, it’ll be better acting, because you won’t be so fixated on the exact words, you’ll be free to search for the word you come up with.” And it helped me. In the daytime world, intent is everything. As long as you get everybody’s name right, and have the right intent, they’ll move on. If you paraphrase or something like that, don’t worry about it. Move on. It’s not like a playwright, who would freak out. Neil Simon would go ballistic is someone was paraphrasing anything of his.
PLUME: I’m assuming that you didn’t see the soap work as an end-all, be-all. Being located in New York as opposed to L.A., how does that affect one’s career when it comes to being able to line up other work?
CRANSTON: I remember doing a series of stuff there. I did more commercials there, too. I did a play in New York, off-off-Broadway play. I was enamored with it, I loved it. Of course, I was single, had a little bit of fame and some money, and it was like, “This is a great life!” I loved the city. My manager was back here, though. The television world – there’s far more jobs in television than there are in features, so the television world was really in Los Angeles. So after I left the show after two years… actually, they left me – they didn’t renew my contract after two years, they just said, “Nah, we’re going to go a different way.”
PLUME: How were you written out?
CRANSTON: I was written out, and they later brought someone else back who made a lot less money than I did. They were trying to, much as we see in the sports world today, they’ll cut loose someone and bring someone in because they cost less. But still, it was kind of a painful thing, and I remember being called in, and I took it as a firing. I was being fired. You can’t help but think, “He must not like my work. I must not be good.” You know? That kind of feeling. As much as they say, “No, no, it’s not that. We’re just going to go in a different direction.” You can’t help but make it personal. It’s happening to you. I remember the day of my firing, I went out in a daze and told my friends who were there, “I just got cut loose.” They went, “Oh my God.” I was scheduled to see a play that night, it was called After the Fall. So I went to see After the Fall, and I’m after the fall. I’m in a daze, going, “Oh, that’s right. I just got fired.” It was bizarre, the feeling. That was on a Friday in November, late October … I grabbed my camera and a bunch of film and I went out into Central Park, and I thought, “Okay, get out of it. Go do something, take some pictures and just walk around.” Well, I go to Central Park, and I see that they’ve got everything lined up for the marathon. I was there early, and I stood at the end of the marathon. I was feeling a little sorry for myself until I saw, “Okay, here comes the winner. Look at him, he’s cruising in, he’s got great form, he’s a good athlete.” I stayed there for five hours and I watched all these people come in. I’m at the finish line, these people have finished 26 miles of running. Grandmothers, people with one leg, people in costumes, people with Cerebral Palsy, people in wheelchairs, old people, young people, crazy people – all nationalities, all colors. It just brought me so out of myself, “Look, it’s fantastic. This sea of humanity is just running right in front of me!” And I’m just taking pictures like crazy. I look over now in my office, and I can see the collage that I made of that day, that I still have. I look at it, and it’s inspirational to me. I heard myself, “Man, I’ve got to do that some day.” I hated running, I hated it. So it was that night, “I’ll never do that.” Then I heard myself, “I can’t run 26 miles.” It was just because I just got fired, that my whole being could not take an “I can’t …” fill in the blank, anything. I said, “I have to. I don’t know why this came into my life here, but I have to do this, because I can’t accept an ‘I can’t’ right now.” I just said, “All right. I am going to run a marathon. Next year, I am going to run the next year’s marathon, the ’85 New York Marathon.” It took me like three months to even confront putting on sneakers, let alone running. I was just, “Oh my God, I hate this so much.” I’d run for 15 minutes, then go, “Oh, God, that’s enough! That’s enough.” Then I realized, “Oh my God, I’m going to die!” Now I’m challenged – “Oh my God, I’m going to fail! I can’t fail!” and this whole thing. Fortunately, I bumped into a guy – I came out to California and did a job here, and met a guy who wanted to run a marathon … He said, “I want to train for one.” I go, “Want to train together?” because that’s the toughest part. So we kind of hooked up and started training together, and sure enough, I came back to New York and the next year I ran it. I ran it in what turned out to be, out of four marathons, my fastest time was my very first one. Each subsequent run after that, slower and slower and slower and slower – because I lost incentive.
PLUME: You’d already proven your mental point.
CRANSTON: “I already did it! Come on – move onto something else.”
PLUME: When was the last one you ran?
CRANSTON: Boy, the last marathon I ran was probably 10 years ago.
PLUME: Ironic that when we’re discussing an acting career being a marathon, that would be the thing that pulled you out of the fall.
CRANSTON: Yeah, and it really suits my temperament, my approach to things. I think long haul, just plan it out, build the foundation. Try to build up from there slow and steady – don’t get to freaked out about little, minor failures. Just kept the course and keep going. Keep plugging away and keep going. I think that’s somewhat important, moderation and everything.
PLUME: What would you consider to be your next landmark role?
CRANSTON: I’m looking at the next one now. I’m going to play a role in a movie that I wrote that is going to require a lot of work on my part. Not only mentally and emotionally, but physically. I need to get down to a hard rock kind of a guy. He’s a guy who doesn’t talk a lot. His emotions are kind of hardened, and so is he, physically, as a manifestation of that. It’s a family drama with a murder mystery background.
PLUME: That’s an interesting launch pad.
CRANSTON: Actually, it was presented to me. I optioned a novel from William Morris and that was the story. It was interesting that the book, I felt, had promise. It would alternate chapters, first person narrative from my – if I’m speaking as the character – my 16 year old son’s perspective, and then third person narration of Pete, my character’s, activities. It would alternate, back and forth, back and forth. It’s basically a father and son story. The father starts out the movie on a high, he’s an FBI hero, he does everything right, he’s a man of his word and an honorable guy, faithful and everything. As the course of the movie goes, he declines and falls into this unstoppable spiral of a mid-life crisis that he is completely unaware of until it just slams into him, like a brick wall. Simultaneously, the 16 year old introverted son, trying to live in his father’s shadow and feeling intimidated by that and introverted and can’t function, even though he is, he starts coming of age and accepts who he is, and embraces who he is. He has the alternate path that his father is on, and they intersect in the climax, emotionally and physically, and literally save each other’s life in the end.
PLUME: Hinging upon the role reversal?
CRANSTON: I think what happens is they each allow the other person to be who they are and accept that. It turns out to be a film about acceptance and disappointment, and insecurity and failures and frailty in the human condition – as opposed to celebrating how great we are. My character is sort of an anti-hero, although everybody in his town thinks he is a hero, because of what he did for a living. He just crumbles, and he can’t take that pressure. At first, he could just smile and say, “That is part of who I am,” but through this digression, he becomes professionally impotent, while creating this unbelievable, unstoppable attraction to another man’s life. He finds out that his son has this secret that he cannot live with, it was very plot heavy like any novel, but to my own satisfaction. I have to have character development. I do not like films that I don’t get to know people – whether I hate them or not, I get to know them. So I need, for my own satisfaction, I need to have well-developed characters. So I added that amount to it, which ballooned the script to 168 pages. I hope to do that. I think it’s coming along pretty good, as far as the producers end of it.
PLUME: What stage is it at right now?
CRANSTON: We are having a meeting on it tomorrow, with two producers who are interested in it who like it very much, and who like me as the lead. They don’t have any qualms about that.
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