“But I’m not sure this has happened before: Where we take one kind of person-bright, depressed, just turned 50, dying of cancer-and say, ‘For the next two years, he’s going to go on the greatest roller-coaster ride of his life.’” When we were introduced to them, they were already that kind of person,’” says Cranston. “When I first read the script, that’s what struck me: I thought, ‘Tony Soprano, Dexter, Vic Mackey. Chips to Scarface” has arguably been the most harrowing-in part because we’ve watched the creation of Heisenberg, as White is known on the street, step by mostly well-calibrated step. In an era rife with seductive antiheroes, Walt White’s transformation from, as creator Vince Gilligan likes to say, “Mr. He, of course, is Walter White, whose journey from depressed, terminally ill chemistry teacher to murderous meth manufacturer on Breaking Bad begins its final chapter this month.
Even they, though, might have been surprised to know what we now know about what Bryan can do: how he’s transformed himself into Him. Instead, a second, corollary game sprang up: “What can’t Bryan do?” Here, too, the writers’ imaginative powers proved inadequate to the task, whether the challenge was roller-dancing or using his body as an enormous nude paintbrush. They called it “What won’t Bryan do?” When the game culminated in Hal covered by thousands of live bees, with no protest from Cranston forthcoming, it was deemed unwise to continue. Years ago, in another lifetime-long before the hat, the goatee, the shaved head, before He, the Unholy Ghost, came into Bryan Cranston’s life-the writers on the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle used to play a game in which they invented increasingly violent, absurd, and physically humiliating stunts for Cranston’s character, Hal, to enact.