Desperate teacher enters drug trade in AMC series

Bryan Cranston plays the teacher who is dying of
cancer.

By FRAZIER MOORE

AP TELEVISION WRITER

NEW YORK — “Breaking Bad” has cooked up this startling premise: A decent man decides to make and sell an evil drug, crystal methamphetamine.

He’s a high school chemistry teacher who learns he has terminal cancer. He and his family already are barely scraping by. To leave his wife and kids provided for, he must put his chemistry know-how to a more lucrative purpose than lecturing to vacant teens. Cooking meth is deplorable. But it can mean big money, fast.

Not that viewers who catch the premiere episode (10 p.m. Sunday on AMC) will grasp right away what “Breaking Bad” is about. The opening scene is artfully bewildering: A frantic fellow in his underpants and a gas mask is barreling through New Mexico no-man’s-land in a boxy motor home. Just one thing is immediately clear: Here is a show that will keep the viewer guessing.

Following last summer’s ambitious, Golden Globes-winning drama “Mad Men,” AMC has further upped the ante with its second dramatic series, taking even more chances. “Breaking Bad” dares to be bleak, heartbreaking, shocking and bitterly funny, hurtling its milquetoast hero into situations he couldn’t have imagined.

It also took a gamble by casting as the plagued Walter White an actor best-known for playing the goofy, distracted dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” — Bryan Cranston.

But from the first scene, Cranston proves he’s made a thorough transformation, leaving any trace of Hal Wilkerson in the dust of Walter’s fleeing mobile meth lab.

Inhabiting this new character wasn’t hard, says Cranston. “Walter White is a guy who has very common flaws. To step into his shoes was a comfortable fit,” he explains.

But there was more to being Walter than shoes.

“When I visualized him, I thought he should be colorless,” says Cranston. “So we took out all the ruddiness in my face. I put a brown rinse in my hair, to take out the red highlights.” He accessorized with glasses and a nerdy Ned Flanders mustache. “I went to the costume designer and said, ‘I think everything he wears should be taupe and sand. I think this man should blend into the scenery.’”

Cranston also gained 15 pounds, to give Walter a doughy waistline. (For later episodes, he dropped the excess weight as Walter undergoes cancer treatment.)

“Here’s a man,” says Cranston, “who could have done a lot in his life: a high-six-figure income at a pharmaceutical firm of his choice. Maybe share in a Nobel prize. But he didn’t reach for the brass ring, and he has lived a life of regret for 25 years. Then he gets the diagnosis.

“But the irony is, ever since he got that death threat, he’s felt more alive than ever. He’s fed up and ready to take charge. And given his set of dire circumstances, for him to use what he knows to do what he does — it seems to make sense.”

In an interview, the 51-year-old Cranston is hearty and outgoing, and exudes the satisfaction of an actor who works steadily. But long ago he moved beyond that mark of success. For one thing, he can boast a special status as one of the recurring kooks on “Seinfeld”: dentist Tim Whatley.

Then he got the hit comedy “Malcolm,” which wrapped in 2005 after seven seasons, leaving him in the grateful position “where you don’t have to work for the sake of working, where you have the ability to say no.”