"Breaking Bad" may have ended six months ago, but Bryan Cranston remains just as passionate about the epic series and his role of Walter White. Talking to The Guardian about his current run on Broadway as former president Lyndon Johnson in "All the Way," the conversation keeps shifting back to Cranston's breakout role. When questions of moral rise, he quickly jumps to White's -- which The Guardian dubs as "possibly the darkest and most morally ambiguous protagonist in television history" -- defense:
"Do anyone's motives have purity? Mother Theresa, maybe. But people like that are saints who walk the earth, and very few," he says. "'Breaking Bad' resonated because there's a Walter White in every person in the world. We're all capable of it. It's never realized in most of us. But given the right circumstances, anyone could be threatened enough, fearful enough, desirous enough."
"Walt was a man who was depressed; his emotions were cocooned. He didn't know how he felt. And then the terminal diagnosis frees him: 'Fuck it! If I do one bold thing in my life, this is it. And it's for my family. And then I die.' Of course, a simple plan goes awry."
Of course, this interview isn't the first time Cranston has defended, or tried to explain, the motives of his villainous character. Echoing a similar sentiment, Cranston tried to shed light on White's inner-workings at a NYC event back in August:
"For me it was, 'By God, if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna have something I can leave to my family.' You want to feel that sense of pride and responsibility. I kept conjuring in my head ... It was never spoken to the writers … But for me, it was the sense of humiliation. He got a glimpse of what his last few weeks might be. That he would shrivel up, and his wife would have to empty his bedpan, that he would empty their savings, leave them penniless and die .. So those were the motivating factors to do something bold and risky for the first time in his life."
For much more with Cranston and how "Breaking Bad" has changed his life, head over to The Guardian.
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