PLUME: Real quickly, I want to name off your castmates, and if you could just give me a quick impression of them, a summation of working with them – starting with Jane (Kaczmarek)…

CRANSTON: Jane is the thoroughbred. Let’s go with horses. Jane is the thoroughbred. Frankie (Muniz) is the young, extremely promising – he’s the star. Frankie is the star quarter horse, just blasting out of the gate. Then you have a stable of young colts in Chris (Masterson) and Justin (Berfield) and Eric (Per Sullivan), who are playful and they explode at some times. They can run a race, they can do it, and they have a lot of promise. I’m the old horse who drags the wagon with all them in the back. I get them to the racetrack. Everybody else runs, and I’m the one that hauls them to the racetrack. I’m thankful for that job, because without it, I’d be in the glue factory.

PLUME: Someone, I was reading, compared you to when the Simpsons started. When the series started, the star ostensibly of the show was Bart. But, as time went on, more stories were relegated to Homer, just as a more dependable go-to character for reactions or hinging plots. It seems like you can see that transition happening on Malcolm, as Hal is being brought to the forefront a lot more often than he was in the first season. Do you see that happening at all?

CRANSTON: Well, I did in the second season – I thought had more story lines than the first. But this season, it didn’t seem to pan out as I had thought, as least in these first 14 or so.

PLUME: Of course, the Super Bowl episode was pretty heavy Hal.

CRANSTON: Yeah… I think the thing about him is that Linwood doesn’t structure the show around any one person, period. So he just structures the show around concepts – funny concepts and funny ideas. So if you first do that, if you start with a funny idea – strong, funny concept and show idea – then you think, “Who’s the logical person to handle this at any given point?” And that’s how you delegate. It’s the most sensible way to go, because the story is always the most important element. Whereas, I think networks and the movie studios make their mistake if they say, “Let’s get John Goodman to a show.” They sign John Goodman. “Okay, now what do we do with him?” You know what I mean? It’s backwards. You first have to have the good story. What’s the good, solid story that you want to tell. What is the situation, and then fit the actor to the situation – not the other way around.

PLUME: Otherwise, as a viewer, you look at it and say, “This is constructed, as opposed to being organic.”

CRANSTON: Yes. Yes, it feels contrived. Normal, Ohio was an ill-conceived idea. They signed John Goodman, now let’s get him a show. What would be the opposite of John Goodman? How about if John Goodman’s gay? Let’s do that. And he’s in Hollywood. No – what’s the opposite of Hollywood? Ohio. You know what I mean? I can just see the construct of that … so, all of a sudden, it’s conceptualized around someone else, and not what the story requires, or there is no story. You manufacture a story around existing elements.

PLUME: Unfortunately, that becomes so two-dimensional that the construct becomes the only story you can tell.

CRANSTON: Exactly, exactly … you can only go with concept and that’s it. I think you’re lost then. I think you’re lost.

PLUME: Right off the get-go, you’re already struggling.

CRANSTON: Yes, you’re struggling to find some center to it. That’s just my opinion. Then you look at Seinfeld, and you go, “Well, Seinfeld was created that way.” Seinfeld was already a stand-up comedian, let’s put him in here and build around. So it’s possible, but I think it’s more often than not a failure.

PLUME: Do you foresee still doing Malcolm 5 years from now, 6 years from now, 10 years from now?

CRANSTON: No. Not unless they come up with a concept that can transcend the current situation. Two of the boys – the characters of Malcolm and Reese – are both 16 years old. By the end of five years, they’ll be 18, and it sort of ceases to be funny anymore. You can take complaints from a 12 year old, but an 18 year old, it’s like, “Shut up. Get a job.” You know what I mean? If they come up with a clever way to work it out, I’d be more than willing to continue. But my feeling, my gut feeling is that we’re going to do 5 years, maybe 6, and then we’ll be done. I think like a proud athlete, Linwood Boomer would rather hang it up than have an asterisk next to the name of the series saying, “A really good show for 5 years, and then it dropped off and became also ran.” It’s better to leave it alone.

PLUME: With a semblance of dignity.

CRANSTON: Yeah.

PLUME: What do you see yourself doing in 5 or 10 years? What is your optimum scenario? What would you like to be doing?

CRANSTON: Well, I see myself doing what I’m doing now, and that is I have a bunch of projects that I have going on. I have about 4 different projects in various stages, and I don’t really get into them as far as discussing them, because it takes a lot of energy and time to do that, and it may be something that doesn’t pan out. There’s so many things that are timely in that you might have a great idea, but it’s just the wrong time to do.

PLUME: Is there any particular preference that you have, as far as would you prefer that most of your energy is spent on writing or directing or acting? Where do you see your interests shifting to?

CRANSTON: My passion is becoming involved in good work, whether that means as an actor or writer or director or producer or all – that is not as important to me. For instance, one thing that I’m working on right now that I’ve been looking at possibly directing, is a movie – but I keep rethinking this, and I thought, “I think it would be better served in someone else’s hands as far as directing.”

PLUME: As far as objectivity, or just dividing your attention too thin?

CRANSTON: Could be a little bit of both, but perhaps objectivity. It’s a story involving 22 year olds, and I’m 45. It’s not that I can’t get into that head, but it would be more effort on my part to do that, than a 28 year old filmmaker that I know who just had a film premiering at Slam Dance, and I brought him the script instead. And he likes it a lot. So, I thought, “You know what? I think in this case, I think it would better serve the project to have someone else take it over as far as directing.” That doesn’t mean that I’m not hands-on as a producer, which I am. I’m a stickler as far as story and production value and all that. So there’s an example. If it feels right that I’m the one to make the project, then I’ll go with that. But if I think it could be done better somewhere else, then I’m willing to go there.

PLUME: So there’s a certain level of objectivity when it comes to what’s best for the project.

CRANSTON: Yeah. I think that’s the most sensible way to go, and to allow your ego not to become involved in it, but that the criteria remains that you’re only getting involved in projects that you can be passionate about.

PLUME: Otherwise you have a project that you’re ultimately never going to be happy with anyway.

CRANSTON: Right. Exactly. Or have regrets of how you did something or how you didn’t do something.

PLUME: If you were to do a summation overview, personally, would you say that you’re happy with where you are right now, with your career?

CRANSTON: You know, absolutely. I’m so far beyond my mental capacity right now. I was raised very humbly, and my family basically from a stand-point of being raised during the Depression, my mother and father as children during the Depression got a full dose of, “Hey, get a job, hold a job, take a job – whatever you have. Stretch a dollar. Make it last for as long as you can.” And that was the mentality that I’m a product of – their teaching. So my family has been all the way up and down, the generation above me – my aunts and uncles, mother and father, that sort of thing – have all been through the Depression. It was a tough time, but it created a whole mindset for this country, and that was, “Hey, be thankful with what you’ve got. Don’t complain, just go to work.” So I was never taught any sense of take a chance, focus on making money. I was never taught any of that – it was always about how to save a dollar, not how to make a dollar …

PLUME: It wasn’t exactly an experimental nature.

CRANSTON: No, no, it was all reaction as opposed to being proactive and being aggressive in creating. So it was a whole new thing for me.

10 QUESTIONS

1. What is your favorite piece of music?
Pacabel’s “Canon”.

2. What is your favorite film?
The Great Escape.

3. What is your favorite TV program, past or current?
Besides Malcolm In The Middle? I’m going to say The Andy Griffith Show.

4. What do you feel has been your most important professional accomplishment to date?
Working on From The Earth To The Moon.

5. Which project do you feel didn’t live up to what you envisioned?
The Louie show.

6. What is your favorite book?
I like spy novels, mysteries… Grisham… Ludlum… I don’t often afford myself the joys of just reading for pleasure. It seems that everything I read has some other connection to it – a script, a play, etc. I’d like to change that.

7. If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be?
I wouldn’t have us have so many self-congratulatory awards. I wouldn’t have so many self-congratulatory award shows.

8. Who – or what – would you say has had the biggest influence on your career?
I think I have a reputation that I know exactly what I’m doing, but “trial and error” is my basic motto, and I error a lot in order to succeed at some. So I have to try a lot and work very hard in order to figure out what’s right. Nothing is easy.

9. What is your next project?
The next project is going to be a screenplay that I wrote, currently titled Soul of a Hunter, that we’ll produce this year.

10. What is the one project that you’ve always wanted to do, but have yet to be able to?
I’d like to do a story of heavyweight fighter – I don’t want to say who it is because it’s a great story (and they’re very hard to come by), so I can’t let the cat out of the bag. Hopefully I’ll be able to latch onto that.

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