Bryan Cranston opens up about his father leaving to pursue ‘futile’ Hollywood dream

‘It was never what you’d hope a father-son relationship would be,’ said the ‘Breaking Bad’ star

Bryan Cranston has opened up about the difficult relationship he had with his late father.

The Breaking Bad actor’s father, Joseph Cranston, was a B-movie screenwriter who acted in TV productions such as Space Patrol, Dragnet and The Red Skelton Hour.

Joseph left the family home when Cranston was just 11 years old, to pursue his dream of Hollywood stardom. The pair did not meet again for a decade.

“My dad wanted to become a star,” he told The Guardian. “Which to me is the equivalent of saying that you just want to be rich, without having an idea or a plan of how to acquire wealth.

“‘I want to be a star.’ How futile is that? It’s a sign of immaturity, which I would tell him directly if he were still alive.”

Reflecting on their reconciliation, Cranston said that the pair “got along as best we could”.

“But it’s as if the book of my relationship with my father is missing seven or eight chapters in the middle,” he claimed. “You have to leapfrog the plot and you know you’re missing things. What happened? Why?

“So it was never what you’d hope a father-son relationship would be.”

Cranston also revealed that he partially based the characterisation of Walter White, the egomaniacal meth-cooking protagonist of Breaking Bad, on his dad.

Bryan Cranston as Walter White in ‘Breaking Bad’ (AMC Studios)

Joseph died in 2014. According to Cranston, his father was “sincerely happy” for his son after the success of Breaking Bad – but attempted to leverage Cranston’s newfound career momentum for his own ends.

“He had a great work ethic,” Cranston said. “He was always writing, always looking for work. And he did look out for opportunities to take advantage of my position in order to further his career. Hitting up my agency to read his scripts.”

“So yeah, he was hustling right up to the end.”

Cranston can next be seen in Asteroid City, the star-studded sci-fi film directed by Wes Anderson.