The crew member Bryan Cranston had fired on the spot: “t’s inexcusable behaviour”
Bryan Cranston is a true ‘actor’s actor’ because his rise to stardom was no overnight success, and he doesn’t suffer fools lightly.
Despite not having any connections to the industry when he grew up, Cranston worked hard throughout the 1990s to make a name for himself, and even made memorable guest appearances on classic shows like Seinfeld and The X-Files. Although he became more recognised thanks to his comedic performances as an idiosyncratic father on Malcolm in the Middle, it was his willingness to get dark that landed him the role of his career.
Breaking Bad wasn’t expected to become the phenomenon that it did, such that major networks like FX, which aired the most shows with a significant following, passed on Vince Gilligan’s pilot before Breaking Bad landed on AMC. However, anyone who watched the show immediately began recommending it to their friends, and once the word got out about it and Cranston’s brilliant performance, it slowly built into one of the most significant monocultural events of the 21st century.
The actor’s performance was surprising to many audiences who had come to associate him more closely with his comedic work, but it wasn’t long before Walter White became an iconic character. Although contemporary prestige television was filled with anti-heroes like Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, Don Draper on Mad Men, and Vic Mackey on The Shield, White was the rare character who started off incredibly sympathetic and slowly began being more evil and manipulative as the series moved forward.
Cranston was not only the breakout star of Breaking Bad, but a critical component to its creative success; in addition to regular conversations with Gilligan and the writers’ team, Cranston also stepped in to direct a few episodes. His pride over the project meant that he also wanted to make its production a positive experience for the entire cast and crew, and thus, in an interview with GQ, he revealed that he called for a crew member to be fired after they made other people on set uncomfortable.
“He was incredibly inappropriate and inebriated, and he made a lot of people on our show feel very uncomfortable,” Cranston recalled, “When I went in to talk to my producer about it and said, ‘We’ve got to let him go. We’ve got to fire him. It’s inexcusable behaviour’, he said, ‘It’s already done’.”
While it’s unfortunate that many television sets were corrupted by bad behaviour from crew or cast members who didn’t have respect for their co-workers, Breaking Bad was known for having a productive, creative environment in which everyone felt that they were listened to.
The show was so successful that many of the same cast and crew were carried over to Better Call Saul, Gilligan’s prequel series that explored how the shady lawyer Jimmy McGill, played expertly by Bob Odenkirk, became trapped in the strip mall office from Breaking Bad, where he is first introduced to Walter and Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman.
Cranston has continued to have a remarkable run on the small screen with the acclaimed legal thriller Your Honor, an extended guest role in the crime series Sneaky Pete, and the upcoming revival of Malcolm in the Middle; however, he returned for the last season of Better Call Saul to reprise his role as Walter, suggesting that it is still the character he is proudest of.
