‘Yes, I’m often naked,” says Bryan Cranston. In this case, he’s speaking of a particularly vulnerable moment in his new movie, Trumbo. The film tells the story of the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, perhaps the best known of the Hollywood 10, who in 1947 were jailed and blacklisted for alleged communist sympathies. When Trumbo reports to jail, he submits to a humiliating strip-search – it’s the moment when the power of the state is brought metaphorically to bear upon one helpless man.
“When [the director] Jay Roach and I were talking about that, he said: ‘Do you want to be in underwear, do you want me to just shoot you above the waist or what?’ And I went: ‘No, I should be fully nude, because we need to see this man who was stripped of everything, stripped of his dignity, stripped of his freedom, not of his clothes.’ He becomes like any man exposed to ridicule, exposed to shame and ostracisation – totally vulnerable. It wasn’t difficult to come to that decision. And then it was like, ‘Here we go, pants off! Drop trou!’”
If a script calls for nudity, Cranston is not a man to stint. Devotees of his work will recall his nude “fugue-state” moment in a deserted supermarket in season two of Breaking Bad, the series that made him an international star. Even further back was the episode of Malcolm in the Middle that he spent totally naked – except for a generous coating of filth or sewage.
That sitcom got him a trio of Emmy nominations; Breaking Bad bagged him three wins. Trumbo, meanwhile, has earned Cranston his first Academy Award nomination for best actor. It’s none too shabby a career progression for someone who thought he had it pretty good when he was a jobbing actor, appearing in Airwolf, Deep Space 9 and Seinfeld.
The first thing that strikes you about Cranston is that he has hair of his own. We became so accustomed to his shaven head and sleazy goatee while he was playing feral meth-lord Walter White on Breaking Bad that it’s something of a shock to see his neatly combed, reddish-tinged coiffure sitting happily atop his handsome head, even if, like me, you were a fan of his (more hirsute) work years before Walt showed up.
In Trumbo, Cranston plays the member of the Hollywood 10 whose story probably had the happiest ending. An unashamed communist who had served honorably in the second world war and played an active role in movie politics afterwards, he was one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood. When the witch-hunts came to town in the late 40s, he and his friends were snubbed and insulted, denied work and finally jailed for contempt of Congress, after refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
After their release they were blacklisted for a full decade. The only work Trumbo could find was with the “poverty row” studio of the King brothers (played in the film by John Goodman and Stephen Root) who “need scripts like an army needs toilet paper”. He knocked out about 18 scripts in two years for an average (and derisory) sum of $1,270 each. But he and his friends had their names occluded by the “fronts”, whose names appeared in the credits. One of the movie’s most touching scenes has Trumbo and his family watching the Oscars on TV as his script for Roman Holiday wins best screenplay; the statuette is picked up by his front. In the end, the blacklist was irreparably broken in 1960, when Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger insisted that Trumbo be credited as the writer of both Spartacus and Exodus, two of the biggest hits of that year. Trumbo thereafter remained busy, and no less impassioned and vocal, until his death in 1976.
The film does a good job of recalling the vileness of those years, and name names when it comes to the villains. Foremost among these are the envenomed antisemite and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren, spitting the word “kike” at an outraged but terrified Louis B Mayer), and members of the rightwing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals such as director Sam Wood (John Getz) and actor John Wayne (David James Elliott).
The makers of Trumbo, says Cranston, didn’t consciously set out to evoke our own politically turbulent times – the McCarthy-like Ted Cruz, the slurs, innuendos and, yes, commie-bashing antics of Donald Trump – but the parallels are hard to avoid.
“I think the strength of the script and the story alone gave it its legs,” he argues. “But we were very fortunate to come across this story that does very much resonate now: these fearmongers who ply their trade on the citizens of any enlightened country. And who keep repeating certain stories, certain versions, or distortions, of a story so that people become fearful of the lie, instead of the demagogues spreading it.”
I wonder if this isn’t an ineradicable strain in the American body politic – or even in the American character? From Salem, The Crucible and McCarthy to Cruz and Trump?
“That may be a little too glib, too easy,” he replies. “I would venture to suggest that any country has its fearmongers. The kind of people who notice a certain truth – because there has to be the germ of a truth to a rumour – and then blow it up to make it seem vastly more than what it is. It’s shameful behaviour, then and now.”
There were some very sad stories among the 10, I suggest. “And beyond the Hollywood 10, as well as beyond Hollywood itself,” he says. “Carl Foreman, Walter Bernstein, people were driven out of the country to find work. There’s a tremendous amount of tragic material. And Hollywood gets the focus of that because of its higher visibility, and the nature of what film-makers and Hollywood people do. But the McCarthyites were just as fervent in their attacks outside Hollywood, on people who worked for the military, for the government, teachers and scholars, unions and so on.”
Having achieved financial stability around age 40 with his regular role on Malcolm in the Middle (2000-06), and household-name status at the relatively venerable age of 50, Cranston had had enough hard times and setbacks, but also enough self-assurance, to keep his head when we were all losing ours over Breaking Bad. He’s a character actor’s character actor, promoted from the mass of his constantly auditioning peers into a complicated kind of stardom at a time when he was able to handle it.
“You need to protect yourself from it,” he says. “You could fall into a media maelstrom and never come out of it. Especially if you start taking it at all seriously. I need to protect myself, so when I’m not working, I just shut down, I hide away. I like privacy and solitude. I like slowing down my pace, because my work life has a very fast pace. But my personal life is calm and slow.”
His early life was lived on untrustworthy and ever-shifting ground, in middle-class Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. His parents were occasional actors who never got enough work to sustain family life – he has called them “broken people, incapacitated as far as parenting went” – and when Bryan was 12, they lost their home. It was a harsh early lesson that has stuck with him.
“For the first nine years, my life was solid, and then it started to erode,” he says. There was a fracture in my home life. That’s when I learned, at 12, that when someone says you own a home, you really don’t own a home, the bank does. So that was an education. And my brother and I were shipped off to live with our maternal grandparents, not wanting to join this old German couple on some farm in Yucaipa [60 miles east of LA], and do chores and not watch TV. But by the time the year was up and we were ready to move back with our mother, we didn’t want to come back at all. We had acclimated to a simpler life, to a disciplined life. Everything was more regimented, and that’s where I learned a work ethic that I use to this day.”
Cranston has certainly seized the opportunities available to him since Breaking Bad. A sort of twin work to Trumbo is the forthcoming HBO film All the Way, an adaptation of the Broadway play, in which he revives his Tony-winning performance as Lyndon B Johnson. LBJ, I suggest, is the most Shakespearean of American presidents, a figure worthy of Lear and Falstaff, Caesar and Macbeth.
“Oh, he was very, very Shakespearean – huge in every sense, and vastly complex. He was a man whose ambition would burst out of his body, tremendous ambition and political acumen – and he knew how to use it. When the Kennedy assassination happened, he realised he had a window of opportunity to pass legislation that could change this country. And it was legendary – Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, the Public Broadcasting System – a tremendous amount of domestic achievement in just four years. And yet, for most people, he’ll be for ever known for Vietnam. But just as his political acumen allowed him to pass legislation at home, it was his political hubris that brought his downfall internationally. He didn’t want to be known as the first American president to lose a war, so he was going to win it if he could. But he couldn’t. Think of the fun you can have with a role like that!”
Cranston’s LBJ is one of his explosive performances, compared with his fiercely concentrated work as Walter White, but he does share a lot with Dalton Trumbo. “There’s a lot of parallels: both extremely good at what they did, aggressive, very ambitious, can be irascible, can be irritating, can be great raconteurs. If you did a Venn diagram of their overlap, there’s a lot more within the crossing circles than there is outside them.”
Including Bryan Cranston, obviously.
• Trumbo is out in the UK on 5 February. To enter our Trumbo competition, go to theguardian.com/members
