94 Quotes by Bryan Cranston
Bryan Cranston, born on March 7, 1956, is an American actor known for his transformative performances, exceptional range, and ability to portray complex characters with depth and nuance. Cranston gained widespread recognition for his portrayal of Walter White in the critically acclaimed television series "Breaking Bad," for which he won multiple Emmy Awards. His portrayal of a high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine manufacturer showcased his remarkable acting skills and solidified him as one of the finest actors of his generation.
Cranston's talent extends beyond television; he has also excelled in film and stage productions, displaying his versatility and dedication to his craft. From dramatic roles in films like "Trumbo" and "The Upside" to comedic performances in movies like "Malcolm in the Middle," Cranston's ability to fully inhabit a character has garnered him critical acclaim. His commitment to his roles, attention to detail, and the emotional depth he brings to his performances have made Bryan Cranston a highly respected and admired actor in the industry.
Bryan Cranston Quotes
With craziness, you can't predict it. There's very little defense you can have on craziness.
I think naturally, if you're an actor, there's a high level of assertiveness that you need to have to survive this business. There's boldness in being assertive, and there's strength and confidence.
You get addicted to emotions. Our endorphins kick in and it's like a high. On the low end you might love roller coasters. On the high end you might be a bank robber or something.
I think it's not a question of why, more a question of why not.
I don't think life owes me anything and the business doesn't owe me anything. The only way to approach it is by working hard and loving what you do. If you do that and have faith, maybe you will get lucky. I mean that sincerely and specifically. I truly believe that no professional career in the arts is capable without a healthy dose of luck.
If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
Take a chance. Take a risk. Find that passion and rekindle it. Fall in love all over again. It`s really worth it.
When 'Malcolm in the Middle' was over, I was looking for a drama more than a comedy...but if it was a comedy that came up, it would have to be as well-written as 'Malcolm' was, and it would have to be a different kind of character than I played on that show. That's harder to come by. In drama, there were more opportunities, more options for me, and when I read ('Breaking Bad'), it was just, 'Good night, Nurse! I'm going after this sucker!'
Good storytelling doesn't have to be in the form of the classics. It doesn't have to be revered by everybody. In fact, to me, the best storytelling is not universally loved by every single person. I think you can water down the ethicacy of the work, itself.
My personal feeling, if I can interject a political note, is that I don't think it is right that basic health care is a privilege. It shouldn't be. It should be a right of all human beings. And certainly in the richest country in the world.
If you work hard, you have a better chance of producing something that you're proud of. If you don't, you won't. It's really simple.
In order to be an actor you really have to be one of those types of people who are risk-takers and have what is considered an actor's arrogance, which is not to say an arrogance in your personal life. But you have to be the type of person who wants the ball with seconds left in the game.
Every experience feeds an actor, and I've learned that depression is all around us.
When everyone has high expectation for you, it can attack your insecurities.
I enjoy doing comedy for the fact that you go to work and you laugh. That's a good combination.
What's great about comedy, obviously, is that you set up a situation that people assume one thing and then you break the assumption. That's basically the backbone to comedy. You set up a situation, let people make an assumption, and then you break the assumption.
When you play a non-fiction character it is more responsibility than when you are playing a fiction character because that person lived, and you do want to pay respect to that.
You need to tell the truth to the audience, or they will throw a brick through the TV. They'll turn you off.
Viewers can determine what they want to watch and what they don't want to watch.
The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.
It's in our nature to be intrigued. We're putting the bread crumb not in your mouth but close to your mouth. You reach a little bit, and that's why it works.
This self-congratulatory notion Americans have that their country is Number One is borne of ignorance and bad manners.
It's like a dance, to choreograph a fight is like a dance. It's very specific. You have to carefully plan it out. Because if someone gets hurt, then we didn't do our job, someone screwed up. The fight choreographers and the actors involved, we messed up somewhere.
Actors are inherently self-centered.
To me, character in a person is judged by the decisions that are made under pressure.
If you're a person who complains about everything all the time, then you're just the boy who cried 'wolf.' But if you do it on occasion and about the right reasons, then people listen.
People would love to be rich, but they're looking for the easy way. Who wouldn't want to win the lottery? Just to score.
Love between two adults is always conditional. You can fall out of love because you are able to fall in love.
Luck is a component that a lot of people in the arts sometimes fail to recognise: that you can have talent, perseverance, patience, but without luck you will not have a successful career.
The more you humanize superhero characters, the more they're relatable. The more they have a vulnerable point, whether it's emotionally or their superpower, or whatever, we relate the superpower or the loss of a superpower to their emotions. It's just fun to walk through that.
Actors are inherently self-centered. We're trained to focus on who I am. What do I want? Who is in my way? How do I get this? That's how we're trained. Unfortunately, that sometimes spills over into real life. But it's all very subjective. You just try to portray someone beyond the surface, the different layers.
There's so many things that can go wrong in the execution of a project like a television show or a movie, so many little elements, any number of things, all the way to marketing - like they could market it poorly and nobody finds it and down it goes.
If you like vanilla, you're not going to like 'Breaking Bad' - you need to like a specific flavor that is unusual, that is different, that takes risks.
I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.
It's up to the actor to make sure they don't get typecast.
It's a familiar story now: a meek and depressed high school chemistry teacher with terminal cancer cooks up a scheme to make and market a superior grade of methamphetamine to provide a nest egg for his family after he's gone. But over the course of five seasons Walter White goes from milquetoast to murderous in order to survive.
My passion is becoming involved in good work, whether that means as an actor or writer or director or producer or all - that is not as important to me.
It doesn't matter if you're good. If you're just good, you won't succeed. If you have patience and persistence and talent and that's it, you will not have a successful career as an actor. The elusive thing you need is luck.
There are far more talented people doing voice work than I.
I want to make sure that what I do has specific purpose and is not just throwing a dart at something to keep busy.
There's boldness in being assertive; there's strength and confidence.
Any kind of civil rights oppression is wrong.
Had "Malcolm in the Middle" been picked up I would not have been available for the pilot of "Breaking Bad." And right now someone else would be sitting in this chair talking to you. Not me.
Being from a divorced family almost felt like a scarlet letter at times. And I denied it for a long time.
Love is not as important as good health. You cannot be in love if you're not healthy. You can't appreciate it.
I've done more crap than I care to remember. I really have. 'Airwolf.' 'Murder, She Wrote.' 'Amazon Women on the Moon.' But you learn from all these bad shows. What you don't want to do and what you don't want to be involved with.
The things you want professionally are opportunities. And through my good fortune that's what's happened. Opportunity has come to me.
Bad for the sake of bad is boring to me and not believable.
The TV business is like the produce section of the market. Today everything is fresh and glistening and firm. And tomorrow, when they find a bruise on you, they toss you out.
Actors, writers, directors - that triumvirate of creativity - we have to rely and trust each other to be able to get to the final product.
As a director you come in and tell the actors how good they are.
When you're directing an ongoing series, the tone has already been set. So a director will come in and fulfill that tone - reinforce the characters and their behavior. The challenge is to find unique ways that you can visually tell the story while keeping the established tone and the pace and the characters.
People who are at their peak right now will not sustain that. You can't. It's against the law of nature.
Something's happened in our society which I don't think is beneficial, and that's that you see the public being fed box-office news. Newscasts now, every local station - I've been traveling around the country a lot, and you see the local news, and they give box-office reports.
There's this notion that in order to draw attention and to be considered for roles I want to be considered for, you need a certain amount of notoriety.
Money has never been my primary goal.
If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.
I've got a whole mantel just waiting for those awards to come, a whole big mantel. There's just so much vailable space. I've got the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, all ready to shine on them. I dust it off every day.
Pot always just made me sleepy.
I think, and I mean this sincerely, I was raised humbly. We were a lower middle income family and a household that was scrimping by at times. We were watching the dollar, stretching the dollar, and coupons. It was all those things.
Hollywood has known this for quite a while: Cable is the place to go because they truly have a supportive network and they want to do things that cannot be seen on broadcast. That stimulates the writer-producer. Cable is king.
What's interesting is a man with no facial hair is less intimidating than a man with facial hair, and a man who is bald is more intimidating than a man with hair.
Mixing humor and politics is something that works.
It's mind-altering when you slip into someone else's shoes. That's psychedelic, man.
Given the right set of circumstances any one of us could become dangerous - so why not show that in our programmes?
Every time you start a project, you're hopeful that the critics receive it warmly.
I'm telling you, until I shaved my head, I never realized how much heat is lost through the top of the head. I walk out in winter and it feels like I have an ice pack on my head. Unbelievable.
At my age, I don't think anyone is untouched by cancer.
We've been trained since kindergarten: Be nice, be kind, share, put on a smile. So we're conditioned to squash our natural selfish instincts, and that's the right thing for society.
I love acting because it's empowering. It empowers me.
It used to be that people would watch TV shows because they knew the characters would stay the same. Whether it's Archie Bunker or it's Thomas Magnum you watch it because it's like, 'I'm comfortable, this is the same guy.'
Gay and lesbian couples should have the right to experience the joys of marriage and family.
I appreciate my role as an actor much more after I direct because it's just easier.
What's great about well-written material is, if you can shock with justifiable actions, that's the best.
The only thing that we as actors really can control is to be able to say 'yes' or 'no' to the material.
I intend to do more directing TV.
Being a day player, period, is one of the hardest things you can do as an actor.
The turmoil that my dad went through, and then by extension, the kids went though, was profound and disastrous for the marriage, for the family.
Let me demonstrate. When you greet a friend this is the duration of the kiss that's acceptable. "Hi, good to see you - yeah." When you make a mistake and stay too long at the lips, this is how long it is. "Hi, how are you? Good to see you." And that's what happened. It was like, "Uh-oh, what was that? Oh."
When the sun is shining, make hay, because it would be sunset on my career at some point, and when it is, I want to be exhausted.
It is my biggest fear, something happening to a child, your child, is unfathomable.
There is a peak and valley to careers and that includes fame. If you are lucky to ride this wave of fame to a plateau - it won't last there. I guess it is just a blue-collar work ethic that I was raised with.
I was just infused with ideas and I would dream about it and wake up and go, "Oh, I have another idea about Walter White." It was so well written. And it just got into my soul.
My goal has always been to be a working actor.
Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.
When you're an actor in grade school, high school, college, whatever, you start to realize what you're really good at, what you're kinda good at, what you're okay at, and you start to compartmentalize. But if you know yourself and what you're capable of, it's just a matter of opportunity.
I'm not crazy about being out of control, and I get emotional when things are unclean. When things are out of order. When things are messy. Because I lived in a mess as a child.
When actors first come up, you're auditioning for everything - you're trying to sniff it out like a pig with a truffle and you would do anything!
If you have a screaming angry director, everyone else will be panicked as well.
Any performer would love to have the opportunity to be able to express themselves in many different areas. If you feel confident in those areas, you would hope to have the opportunity to do them, whether it's drama, comedy, musical, or whatever your interests are.
Actors basically are the type of person that with three seconds left, we want the ball. Give us the shot to make it or miss it. We'll take the lumps if we miss it, but we want the chance to get the glory.
That's the reason you want to become a star as an actor, to be able to have more control of your destiny.
What used to frustrate me going into an audition was that some inexperienced, lesser casting people would think that actors are acting only when they're speaking.
I'm just a big boy, I'm still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid.
― Bryan Cranston Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
