Bryan Cranston names his most overlooked movie: “I really enjoyed it”
On the small screen, Bryan Cranston is king.
There’s a joke in Family Guy where all he has to do is sneeze and then get handed an Emmy. Obviously, he’s more talented than that, but it’s kinda true. During his tenure on Breaking Bad, he won six of the winged statues, four of them for ‘Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series’.
It’s not just Walter White who has brought home the bacon. He won a seventh Emmy in 2025 for a guest spot on The Studio, and he was nominated three times for playing his greatest ever character: Hal from Malcolm in the Middle.
It’s easy to forget that, outside of his domination of television, Cranston is also an accomplished movie actor, and you can find him in supporting roles in Saving Private Ryan and Little Miss Sunshine, as well as a number of Wes Anderson projects. In 2016, he was nominated for his first Oscar for playing the title role in Trumbo, which he didn’t win, but it isn’t out of the question that he could one day take home one of the famous golden statuettes.
With so many remarkable film appearances to his name, there are always going to be some that slip through the cracks. In an interview with Bullz-Eye, Cranston was asked about the movie of his that he felt didn’t get the love it deserves and he picked one that most people probably haven’t heard of, but has a very special place in his heart.
“My movie Last Chance, that I wrote and directed, I really enjoyed,” he said, “It was my first directorial job and, quite frankly, was just done on a shoestring budget. People say, ‘How did you know when you were done editing?’ I said, ‘That was easy: when I ran out of money, I was done’. And that was true!”
As well as directing, writing, and producing Last Chance, which came out in 1999 and is so obscure that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page, Cranston also stars as a man who owns a desert cafe with his wife (played by Cranston’s real-life spouse, Robin Deardon), and their dull, unhappy lives are changed when they meet a mysterious drifter, in the form of Tim Thomerson.
As I explained, Last Chance is an incredibly obscure film, apparently available on Amazon Prime, but it doesn’t seem like many people have forked over £2.49 for the privilege. Only 65 Letterboxd users have said they’ve watched it, with not enough reviews to even calculate an average score, but most fall in the one to three stars category.
In short, it doesn’t sound like it’s very good, but, luckily for us, Cranston wasn’t put off. Though he’s never directed a feature film again, he has stepped behind the camera for a number of TV shows, directing himself in Malcolm in the Middle, Breaking Bad, and Your Honor. He’s also worked on two episodes of Modern Family and ‘Work Bus’, a season nine episode of The Office, which got good reviews, but did almost result in the demise of the entire cast.
