The actor Bryan Cranston knows is out of his league: “I have an actor crush on him”
Ask anyone to name the greatest performance in television history, and chances are, they’ll say Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.
With the help of a killer story and script from showrunner Vince Gilligan, the actor managed to create one of the most complex antiheroes ever constructed for the small screen, and arguably took the medium to its zenith – as Walter White, he was both terrifying and fragile, villainous and heroic, and ever since Breaking Bad went off the air, Cranston has cast a wide net, exploring a wide range of characters and branching out far beyond television.
There isn’t a road map for actors who hit A-list celebrity status in their 50s, but Cranston has used the opportunity to impressive ends. He’s earned two Tony Awards for his work on Broadway, received an Oscar nomination for the 2015 film Trumbo, and landed in the unofficial ranks of actors whose mere presence makes every film better.
In other words, Cranston is one of those names other actors bandy around when asked about the greatest of them all, so you know that anyone he himself names in that context would have to be pretty darn accomplished. When it comes to modern-day actors, Cranston’s answer has been consistent – Mark Rylance. “I have an actor crush on him,” the Breaking Bad star told The Standard in 2016.
Known initially for his work on the stage, Rylance has branched out into television and film in recent years and earned a reputation as an actor’s actor, with Al Pacino once saying that he made Shakespeare sound as if it had been written specifically for him the day before.
Sean Penn spent nearly two decades trying to lure him to Hollywood, and Steven Spielberg was so in awe of him that he was actually nervous about sending him the script for The BFG.
Praise for Rylance is pretty universal, whether you ask his directors, scene partners, or anyone lucky enough to watch him doing live theatre. Perhaps the reason he isn’t as famous as, say, Brad Pitt, is that we regularly confuse celebrity with acting talent. That conflation is the guiding principle of Hollywood, after all. Rylance is the real deal as an actor, but fame is about as useless to him as a jet ski would be to a horse. In fact, he’d probably prefer not to have it at all.
Many words have been said to attempt to convey the magnitude of Rylance’s skill, but Cranston provided what may be the most lurid and memorable of them all. “He’s got a little more recklessness, maybe,” the Trumbo actor told The New Yorker in 2013. “It feels like if they told Mark, ‘Oh, your character enters masturbating, full frontal,’ he’d go, ‘Sure, let’s try that tonight.’”
It’s safe to say that if Rylance did in fact do that, he would become a mainstream celebrity overnight, whether he likes it or not, but that clearly isn’t the point. For Cranston, this seemingly mild-mannered Brit is an absolute maniac on the stage and will kill his ego for the sake of the performance unlike anyone else’s. We bow down.
