When Bryan Cranston realised method acting wasn’t for him: “I was exhausted”
When Bryan Cranston first began booking acting jobs, he did so with little formal training beyond an acting class he took at Los Angeles Valley College at 19. Suddenly, he landed stage roles at the Daytona Playhouse in Daytona Beach, before commercial work followed. He was cast in his first movie role – 1981’s Alligator – only five years after college, and two years after that, he began starring in the soap opera Loving.
By this point, there was no sense in Cranston applying for Juilliard or any other prestigious arts conservatories, because he was already working. However, he was conscious of his lack of schooling, so he began putting together his own “method” of acting. “I learned by reading,” he told The Gentleman’s Journal, “by going to a variety of different acting classes, and just learning by doing – by starting my acting career at 23 years old. My method, my approach, is kind of a potpourri of trial and error.”
Over the years, Cranston assembled his method by seeing what did and didn’t work, and adjusting accordingly. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that there were four things any actor needed to be successful, but they weren’t necessarily the same four things any actor needed to be good. To make a living as an actor, Cranston believed he needed to exhibit talent, while being patient and persistent, but above all else, he also needed to be lucky. To get better at his craft, though, he needed talent and three other qualities: curiosity, imagination, and vulnerability.
These days, Cranston is such a masterful performer that he is often credited with giving the best performance in TV history. His Breaking Bad co-star Bob Odenkirk told GQ, “I learned the most about acting from acting in a room with Bryan Cranston.” Indeed, his preparation for any role is meticulous, and it includes making endless lists with ideas for each day on-set, as well as embracing an ability to plumb the emotional depths of his character like few other stars. “If you don’t feel like you’re in a bit of trouble, you’re not digging deep enough,” he once mused.
However, he is also ready to discard all his research and emotional mining to adjust a performance on the fly, because being adaptable is another tenet of a great actor. “You do the homework, you do all the work on the character’s backstory and their wants and needs,” he said. “But when you’re on set, you have to be willing to throw it all away.”
Despite adhering to a rigid method developed over decades of amassing knowledge and trying different things, one thing Cranston most certainly doesn’t practice is “method acting.” He is perfectly adept at switching in and out of character between shots, which sometimes leaves his co-stars reeling. Just ask the colleagues who witnessed him switch from the cold, menacing Walter White to the silly, prank-loving Cranston at the drop of a hat.
Once again, though, Cranston’s opinion on the “method” is founded in practice. “I’ve attempted, a couple of times, to stay in character for an entire day on a film,” he revealed, before quipping, “But, by the time they were getting to me, I was exhausted.”
Cranston’s experience with trying method acting and ultimately deciding it wasn’t for him meant he was uniquely qualified to offer some sage advice to a co-star. Aaron Paul, who played Breaking Bad’s co-lead Jesse Pinkman, practised method acting while playing the drug-addicted, self-hating character, which often led him to “dark alleyways and bad parts of town, trying to just really feed that beast inside of me.”
Cranston noticed the toll this process was taking on Paul, who is 24 years his junior, and one day lightly suggested, “It’s OK to just wash off the makeup and let it go for a moment, you know?” The young Westworld star admitted that one piece of counsel freed him to begin approaching his craft from a different perspective, one much more akin to Cranston’s tried-and-tested method.
