Bryan Cranston
Bryan Cranston
Bryan Lee Cranston is an American actor, voice actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He is best known for portraying Walter White on the AMC crime drama series Breaking Bad and Hal on the Fox comedy series Malcolm in the Middle. For Breaking Bad, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series four times, including three consecutive wins. After becoming one of the producers of Breaking Bad in 2011, he also won the award for...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth7 March 1956
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
My personal feeling, if I can interject a political note, is that I don't think it is right that basic health care is a privilege. It shouldn't be. It should be a right of all human beings. And certainly in the richest country in the world.
When you play a non-fiction character it is more responsibility than when you are playing a fiction character because that person lived, and you do want to pay respect to that.
When everyone has high expectation for you, it can attack your insecurities.
I was just infused with ideas and I would dream about it and wake up and go, "Oh, I have another idea about Walter White." It was so well written. And it just got into my soul.
I don't really relax. When I sleep, I relax.
Every experience feeds an actor, and I've learned that depression is all around us.
I don't think life owes me anything and the business doesn't owe me anything. The only way to approach it is by working hard and loving what you do. If you do that and have faith, maybe you will get lucky. I mean that sincerely and specifically. I truly believe that no professional career in the arts is capable without a healthy dose of luck.
The things you want professionally are opportunities. And through my good fortune that's what's happened. Opportunity has come to me.
What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.
When 'Malcolm in the Middle' was over, I was looking for a drama more than a comedy...but if it was a comedy that came up, it would have to be as well-written as 'Malcolm' was, and it would have to be a different kind of character than I played on that show. That's harder to come by. In drama, there were more opportunities, more options for me, and when I read ('Breaking Bad'), it was just, 'Good night, Nurse! I'm going after this sucker!'
If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
I didn't feel entitled to become a star. I didn't expect it.
I think it's not a question of why, more a question of why not.
It's funny, I do try to maintain health. I started doing Bikram yoga which is that hothouse yoga, the 105 degrees yoga for 90 minutes. It's great, you purge out all the sweat and you're drinking water.