A Life in Parts

by Bryan Cranston

  I went to visit my mother in her apartment. We were going out to lunch—nothing special—Sizzler or something. She was changing in the bedroom and taking an eon. I knocked. Mom? There was a meek I’m fine from behind the door. Finally, worried, I went in, and she had one arm through a twisted pant leg and the pants’ waist was stuck over her head. She was trying to get her pants on over her head as if she were putting on a sweater. Here let me help you, I said. Those belong down there.

  About the same time, I was asked to raise money and awareness at the annual Alzheimer’s Walk. Leeza Gibbons, David Hyde Pierce, Victor Garber, and Shelley Fabares were there. All had parents afflicted with the disease. I got to talking about my mother and described some of her behavior. They said, “Those sound like the beginning symptoms of Alzheimer’s. You need to go have her checked.” They were incredibly helpful.

  She did indeed have Alzheimer’s. I called the Motion Picture & Television Hospital, a wonderful medical facility for members of the entertainment industry; actors, crew, production, and so forth are welcome. They had an Alzheimer’s ward funded by Kirk Douglas and his wife. They told me they were changing their policy soon because of the demand, the flood of aging baby boomers. Soon my mother wouldn’t be eligible.

  We went through the channels and applied, and she made it under the wire and got a room. When we first got there, Sandy Howard, who had produced many movies, including A Man Called Horse and The Island of Doctor Moreau, showed us around the facility. Sandy was informative and gracious; we thought he was a volunteer. He wasn’t. He was a patient who still felt the need to be needed.

  The facility was beautiful. The patients could wander outside on walking paths and gardens; they could experience the open greenness of nature. Of course the openness was an illusion. Fencing and gates prevented them from walking off. Patients had the sense they could roam freely, but, for their own protection, they weren’t truly free.

  One day I got a call from the nurse practitioner, Susan. “Your mom is fine,” she said. “But a situation has arisen . . .”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Your mother is, well, a friendly person. And she has developed a relationship with another patient.” Knowing my mother was the Blanche DuBois type—I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers—this didn’t surprise me at all. “They really like each other,” the nurse continued. “It’s very rare for Alzheimer’s patients to have . . . amorous feelings.” She paused. “I know this may concern you, Mr. Cranston,” she said, having trouble finding the words. “We have . . . proof that they have . . . consummated their relationship.”

  “Oh?” I said. “What proof?” And then I thought better: “Forget that. I don’t need to know.”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. It must be very difficult for you to imagine your mother with someone other than your father.”

  Actually, it was easy to imagine. My mother had had scores of boyfriends. And several husbands.

  “I do have one concern,” I said.

  “What is it, Mr. Cranston?” said the nurse, serious.

  “What if she gets pregnant?”

  Silence.

  Then the nurse started cracking up, and I laughed, too.

  “I’m thrilled,” I said. “Do they know? Do they romance each other during the day and then forget each other at night? Is it like Groundhog Day every day?”

  The nurse said, “To some degree, yes. There is a thread of recognition. They don’t remember each other’s names. But they recognize each other.”

  I was happy for my mom. She got to have a sweet romance late in her life: two lovers who discover each other anew every day. Every day a new man would pursue my mother. She’d have loved that.

  It turned out her boyfriend was Albert Paulsen, an actor who’d been in The Manchurian Candidate, among many other films and shows, and I’m sure that his stature in Hollywood would have tickled her had she been still able to absorb such details.

  I remember once Robin and I went to visit on arts-and-crafts day. My mother was sitting at a table with the other patients. Everyone was happily crafting away, but my mom had her arms folded across her chest. I could see right away she was stewing. We pulled up a chair next to her. What’s wrong, Mom?

  That woman in the red is trying to pick up my boyfriend, she said. We looked over. The woman in red was mono-focused on gluing her Popsicle sticks together.

  We implored my mom not to be silly. But she insisted: The woman in red was trouble!

  A few minutes later, Albert came in, and the woman in red brightened and swooned and called out to him: Yoo-hoo! Will you help me?

  Robin and I looked at each other. Oh my God. The woman in red was trying to move in on Albert. My mother had lost a lot of her faculties, but not so many that she failed to notice this hussy moving in on her man!

  My mother looked back on the years with my dad as her glory days, but I think the two years she spent in the US Coast Guard was the best time of her life. She had purpose, and she was so pretty, and she was making a paycheck.

  After that, her aperture onto the world got progressively smaller. She narrowed her focus onto men. The right romance would save her. Through the years there were a lot of paramours. She was seeking a feeling of comfort with each guy. And she’d find it for a time. Then the guy would flitter off. So she’d find another one. She hated being alone. Being with someone—anyone—was better than being alone.

  Through the years she had said, “Why don’t I see you more?”

  During an argument, I stupidly blurted out that the problem was she’d invested her time and energy in men rather than her children. “You got back what you put in,” I told her. I regretted that.

  She couldn’t see or appreciate the love that was available to her. She had three children. All different. All with something to give. Our love wasn’t the kind she hoped for, but it was what she had, and it was real, and she didn’t nurture it.

  Eventually she’d go from the Alzheimer’s facility to intensive care and then on to long-term care, where she’d last another year. She died in August of 2006.

  But there was a window of peace before everything started shutting down. Because of the Alzheimer’s, she couldn’t hold on to the pain and the resentment anymore. She got an illness that would not allow her to dwell in the past. And she was released. After she was diagnosed, we never argued again. Our conversations were simple, words you’d exchange with someone you felt comfortable with, but with whom you had no history of misalignment or pain. We’d smell a rose on her walking path. We’d feed the ducks in the pond.

  “Look at that one. He’s too fat.”

  “Let’s not give him any bread.”

  Unemployed Actor

  Sitting at a bowling alley, cheering on my daughter, I noticed my cell phone ringing. As the ball traced its glacial trajectory, I picked up. It was Peter Liguori, the president of the Fox Television Network at the time. I knew Peter well from my time on Malcolm in the Middle. He was smart, a nice guy. I liked him.

  At the end of our seventh season on Malcolm, Fox told us not to break down the sets, not yet, a strong indication they were contemplating picking us up for another season. I loved the idea of one more year of hijinks as Hal. We knew word could come down at any moment. Then it did.

  So now I found myself in a very familiar spot for an actor. I was without a job.

  I had recently been offered two comedy pilots—both were for goofy dads. But I had just done seven years of goofy dad.

  Taylor’s ball completed its journey, nudging down several pins with a quiet clunk. After pleasantries, Peter said he wanted me to rejoin the Fox family. He was offering me a role in a pilot for the upcoming development year. The series was called Nurses.

  Nurses was a sexed-up version of Grey’s Anatomy—as if that show needed to be sexed up. Peter was offering the role of the head doctor of the emergency room at a Philadelphia hospital. To conveniently complicate things, my character’s daughter wa
s one of the main nurses on the floor. Drama ensued! The show, as far as the pilot script indicated, would follow the trials and tribulations of nurses balancing work and personal life. Oh, and apparently everyone—including my doctor character—had sex in this hospital. A lot of it.

  After playing the hapless dad on Malcolm, the guy who, while shaving his chest hair with an electric razor, notices his pudgy stomach and breaks into song (I’m so full of BACON, my body’s made for SHAKIN’, and when I start to WIGGLE, my nipples they will JIGGLE), I wasn’t exactly a sex symbol.

  And now I was being asked to play a skilled doctor, a leader of men and women, a saver of lives, who happened, in the first episode, to have sex with an attractive associate on the desk in his office? At fifty years old, I was offered a role where I got the girl?

  I was flattered.

  Sadly, the Nurses script was, how should I put this? Shallow?

  Over the years, I’d developed a philosophy, a way of choosing projects: Follow the well-written word and it will not fail you. Good writing is everything to an actor. Give Meryl Streep C-level material, and even at the top of her game, the best you can hope for is she elevates it to a B. Mere mortals might be able to stretch it to a C+.

  As much as I appreciated the offer, I knew immediately Nurses was not for me. What I really wanted to do was a show called Breaking Bad.

  My agent had called me about it a week before. He’d asked, “You remember Vince Gilligan?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The X-Files?”

  “Oh, yeah. I think. I’m not sure.”

  “He wrote this pilot script.”

  It had been eight years since my stint as Patrick Crump, but apparently Vince remembered me, and for some reason he felt I had the right ingredients to inhabit the main character of his new show.

  I read the pilot script in one sitting. I was astonished. A-level doesn’t do it justice.

  You meet Walt on his birthday. He rises listlessly at dawn, exercises without enthusiasm on some sad little mail-order machine, chokes down the limp veggie bacon his pregnant wife has arranged in the shape of a “50” on top of his eggs. He goes to work. High school chemistry teacher. People once called him a brilliant scientist. Now he tries in vain to find one kid who might show interest, who might be semi-open to understanding what he’s trying to convey. Chemistry is the study of change. That’s all of life. It’s the constant. It’s the cycle. It’s solution and then dissolution over and over and over. Transformation. Reformation.

  No one gives a shit.

  Walt goes to his second job at the car wash. He took it to pay for physical therapy for his son’s cerebral palsy, which his insurance won’t cover. Bogdan, his boss, treats him like a simpleton. Walt finds himself applying Armor All to the tires of one of his students. “Hey, Mr. White! Make those tires shine.” On the way home, the glove box in the Walt mobile—a Pontiac Aztek painted impossibly flat avocado—won’t stay shut.

  He grimaces his way through a lackluster surprise party. Hello, hello, how are you? Boxed wine, passive-aggressive sister-in-law, dickish, emasculating brother-in-law bragging about his exploits as a DEA agent.

  His wife is kind of neutral to his depression. She gives him the least sexy hand job in the history of mankind. She’s multitasking, absently stroking while reminding Walt to paint the back bedroom and monitoring an e-Bay auction. Later she scrutinizes the credit card statement and scolds: Did you spend $15.88 at Staples last month?

  Oh God, could it get any worse? It could. It does. Walt collapses at the car wash. Cut to the hospital, where the doctor asks accusingly, Are you a smoker?

  No.

  You have cancer. Inoperable. Best-case scenario—with chemo—a couple years.

  He can’t bring himself to tell his wife. He sits in his backyard and lights one match at a time, tossing each one into his filthy swimming pool. There’s a chemical reaction that takes place when a match is lit: red phosphorous, sulfur, potassium chlorate. All of life is chemistry. He tosses another match into the water.

  (I thought of the mossy green swimming pool of my youth. Mine. Bryan’s.)

  He goes on a ride-along with his brother-in-law Hank and sees a former student fleeing a busted meth lab. Jesse Pinkman? Huh— easy money in meth. Making drugs is really just chemistry. He could generate enough money to cover his medical bills, perhaps leave a little money for his family. He wants to leave something behind. We all do.

  That was the first episode of Breaking Bad.

  I’m not sure I knew what that title meant then, but the script was oh-my-God superb, the best hour-long drama I’d ever read. Great characterizations, complex plots, nuanced story elements, surprises that left you thinking: What on earth is going to happen next?

  By virtue of the writing, I began dreaming about this character, this Walter White. I was waking up in the middle of the night with him on my mind. I recalled being back on the Blue Ridge Parkway, marooned by rain. I got so lost in an Ibsen play, the story and the characters, that I forgot about the rain. I can’t describe how rare that is to find in script form. I can’t explain how an actor longs for that richness and depth and humor and humanity to work with. To build on. This was it. I had no idea where the story was going, but I knew it was gold.

  I had a meeting set with Vince the following week. I told my agents: “Make it sooner.” I went into the AMC offices in West LA, knowing I was scheduled for twenty minutes, and ended up staying an hour and a half.

  “Do you know how he should look?” I asked.

  “Uh, kinda,” Vince answered, smiling.

  I ventured some of the ideas that had come to me since I’d read the script. “He’s missed so many opportunities in life,” I said. “You can see that in every part of him. He has a mustache that isn’t manly. That isn’t anything. You look at him and say: Why bother? His skin and his hair are the same bland hue. He wears pale yellow and sand and taupe. He blends into the background. Invisible. To society. To himself. I’m thinking he’s doughy. One hundred eighty-six pounds.”

  I saw this character, this man, so clearly. I knew how he carried himself. Burdened. His shoulders were slumped like those of a much older man. I was imagining a man who carried himself a lot like my dad.

  When I asked about his plans for the arc of the show, Vince told me in his genteel Virginia drawl, “I want to take this character from Mr. Chips to Scarface.”

  “So you’re going to take this guy from good to bad?” I said.

  He nodded and smiled slyly. “If they’ll let me.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  All television, to that point, had been based on stasis, characters you come to know and love. The prevailing thought for most of the history of television had been that viewers want someone they can count on. Archie Bunker. In every episode of All in the Family, he’s consistently Archie. Jerry Seinfeld, same. Ross and Rachel, you see them in different situations—will they or won’t they?—but they’re invariably Ross and Rachel. Even the characters we’ve known to break new ground, like Tony Soprano. As genius and game-changing as that show and performance were, you didn’t see Tony change a whole lot from the beginning to the end. Tony Soprano is Tony Soprano. Don Draper may change a little, but he basically remains Don Draper until the show’s meditative finale, and even that’s debatable. Some argue the workaholic adman was meditating not on the here and now, but on the creative for a Coke commercial. Classic Don.

  Vince was proposing to blow up the model of a successful show. Walt would truly change. By the time the series ended, he’d be unrecognizable to viewers, to himself.

  “You’re really going to do that?” I asked again.

  “That’s the plan,” he said, laughing.

  “Do you realize that no one’s ever done that in the history of television?”

  Vince shrugged. “We’ll see if it works.”

  I didn’t know if it would work, either. But I knew I wanted in. I had to have it.

  At home, I hand
ed the script to Robin and I said, “Before you read this, know that it shoots in New Mexico.” Whenever I really consider a role, if it’s going to change our lives, Robin is a part of the decision-making process. If the show moved forward, I’d be away from home a significant portion of the year.

  Robin read the pilot and saw what I saw. “Shit,” she said. “You have to do this.”

  The network wanted to bring in five or six guys to test for the role. I was one, thanks to Vince. I heard the list also included Matthew Broderick and Steve Zahn. Walter White was a Jekyll and Hyde character. As talented as Matthew Broderick is, I’m just not sure that he has a Mr. Hyde within him. Steve Zahn? Yes, I can see that.

  Vince was convinced I was the one. The network and studio said: “Bryan Cranston? The goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle? I don’t think that’s what we’re going for. Let’s keep talking.”

  Vince said: “He’s an actor. He can do different roles. That’s what actors do.” He sent the execs the Crump episode of The X-Files, and they saw I could be a different guy. I don’t know if they fell in love with me, but at least they saw I wasn’t a one-trick pony. They opened up to the idea of me.

  Nevertheless, they implored Vince to please be reasonable and allow them to conduct a proper test, march a half dozen actors through auditions for a room of twenty-five people. They would certainly include me in that test, but also most likely they’d include Steve and Matthew, along with possibly Christian Slater, Paul McCrane, Adam Godley, John Carroll Lynch, and Henry Thomas.

  If necessary, of course I’d do the test and try to earn the role. But it was a risk. Even if you knock a test out of the park, you never know who might come in there and hit it harder and farther. Or who might already have the edge because of past relationships. And then the role just slips out of your hands. It happens.

  The actors I was up against were very good; any one of us could have gotten the part. I allowed myself to fantasize: God, wouldn’t it be great if they just offered me Breaking Bad? No test. No competition.