Maybe ‘Bad’ will be Cranston’s big break
“Breaking Bad” has cooked up this startling premise: A decent man decides to make and sell an evil drug, crystal methamphetamine.
He’s a high school chemistry teacher who learns he has terminal cancer. To leave his wife and kids provided for, he must put his chemistry know-how to a more lucrative purpose than lecturing to vacant teens.
The cable series, debuting tonight at 10 on AMC, dares to be bleak, heartbreaking, shocking and bitterly funny, hurtling its milquetoast hero into situations he couldn’t have imagined.
It also takes a gamble by casting as the plagued Walter White an actor best-known for playing the goofy, distracted dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” – Bryan Cranston.
“When I visualized him, I thought he should be colorless,” Cranston says. “So we took out all the ruddiness in my face. I put a brown rinse in my hair, to take out the red highlights.
“I went to the costume designer and said, ‘I think everything he wears should be taupe and sand. I think this man should blend into the scenery.’ “
Cranston also gained 15 pounds, to give Walter a doughy waistline. (For later episodes, he dropped the excess weight as Walter undergoes cancer treatment.)
In real life, the 51-year-old Cranston is hearty and outgoing, and exudes the satisfaction of an actor who works steadily. He can boast a special status as one of the recurring kooks on “Seinfeld”: dentist Tim Whatley.
Then he got the hit comedy “Malcolm,” which wrapped in 2005 after seven seasons, leaving him in the grateful position “where you don’t have to work for the sake of working, where you have the ability to say no.”
He got a crack at the “Breaking Bad” role by chance after appearing in a play in Los Angeles directed by “Seinfeld” chum Jason Alexander.
That performance was seen by “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan, whom Cranston had met a decade earlier while guest-starring on “The X-Files,” where Gilligan was a writer-producer.
For Cranston, the hardest thing to understand was the chemistry.
“I hadn’t studied it since high school,” he says. “So I hung out with a chemistry professor to reacquaint myself with what a periodic table is, and an Erlenmeyer flask, and all that stuff.”
Did he really learn to cook meth?
“Yeah, I did,” says Cranston, looking surprised to admit it. “In fact, we had DEA chemists on our set as consultants.
“I wanted to be sure how a chemist would hold this beaker or measure that ingredient, and so we’re going through the whole process. There is a specific way to go about it, and I did learn.
“But I’ve forgotten already,” he hastily adds, “and I have absolutely no interest in repeating it.”
The birthday bunch
Singer Slim Whitman is 84. Actress Patricia Neal is 82. Comedian Arte Johnson is 79. Director David Lynch is 62. TV host Bill Maher is 52. Actor Lorenzo Lamas is 50. Actor James Denton (“Desperate Housewives”) is 45. Country singer John Michael Montgomery is 43. Actor Rainn Wilson (“The Office”) is 42. Actor Skeet Ulrich is 38. Drummer ?uestlove (The Roots) is 37.