Going 'All the Way': Bryan Cranston talks about taking LBJ to HBO

Bryan Cranston may be more comfortable in Lyndon Baines Johnson's skin than the late president himself was.

Which is saying something, because it took more than two hours a day of hair and makeup work to transform the Breaking Bad star into the charismatic and sometimes confoundingly insecure character he plays in All the Way, which premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday on HBO.

Because he'd already played LBJ on stage, "that character was just deeply in my bone marrow and I knew what I wanted to do, and I was able to enjoy the time in between takes, staying in character and messing with people and having fun," said Cranston in a phone interview Monday.

Adapted by Robert Schenkkan from his play - whose limited Broadway run brought Cranston a Tony - All the Way focuses on LBJ's twin campaigns for historic civil rights legislation and for election to the presidency he inherited when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He's once again directed by Jay Roach, who directed his Oscar-nominated turn in Trumbo.

It's very much a movie, not a film of the play, but to Cranston it still feels like "more of an extension" of the original than a new project.

"The story's the same, the writer was the same, so he was preserving the integrity of the story, just in a different format," said the actor.

"And, yeah, in a different medium you have a different approach to it. You can't do the same things you did on stage, but by the same token, you can't do the same things on stage as you do in film. So it's kind of a nice mix to do it on stage for the six, seven months that I did and then be able to transition it over to television or film. It was fun to do, it really was, and it was very relaxing for me," he said.

Cranston did his own makeup for the stage - "it's tradition" - but playing Johnson in close-up involved more prosthetics, designed and applied daily by Oscar-winning makeup artist Bill Corso.

"So I would see it slowly come into being in the mirror," he said. "That helped me see the character every morning start to come out. And I could ease into it, as opposed to, 'Jump in, let's go.' "

Even if the essence of Cranston's LBJ hasn't changed much, the character is being introduced to a potentially wider audience, and in a presidential election year.

"When we did it on Broadway in 2014, the resonance for me personally" was that it was the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "landmark legislation [that] changed the face of our country," Cranston said.

"Now, we're looking at 2016 and no one could have predicted the temperament politically that we would have been faced with," he said. "It's just astonishing to me how far we've come and how awful the polemic nature of Washington has become and the polarizing factions of our political parties. The vitriol and the name-calling and the finger-pointing is just so incredible."

The Johnson of All the Way can be fiercely combative, but as Cranston sees it, "he would have been able to horse-trade."

In those days, he "would've gone to dinners and lunches and had drinks with members of the Republican Party. When you do that, when you socialize, you then are less likely to throw that colleague under the bus and call them names and have that kind of attitude toward them. It just doesn't warrant that," Cranston said.

"Remember, Republican Sen. [Everett] Dirksen was instrumental in getting the civil rights bill passed. You would be pretty hard-pressed to find that now, to find cooperation across the aisle."

Americans "need to bring out the better side of ourselves. And there is a way to do that," said the actor.

"I have a policy that I want to be able to accept that every person, every person who I happen to disagree with politically, loves this country. They love their country. They just have a different way" of approaching its problems, Cranston said.

Including Donald Trump.

"He is a supreme narcissist, and that's not name-calling, that's just saying, 'Oh, this is who he is.' But even Donald Trump, I believe, loves this country. He just has a completely different way of showing it than I do," Cranston said , laughing.

It's coincidence, he said, that since his Emmy-winning run on Breaking Bad ended he's played three biographical characters - Johnson, blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and in his forthcoming movie, The Infiltrator, undercover DEA agent Robert Mazur.

He pointed to his role in Godzilla, which he took because it looked like fun.

Cranston's happily walked through the doors opened by high school teacher-turned-drug kingpin Walter White, including the one to the Oval Office, where he was recently interviewed with President Obama, a Breaking Bad fan, for the New York Times.

Though, like most actors, he said, he just looks for good stories, he does entertain goals now that might once have seemed out of reach.

"Next year, I'm planning to direct a film from a script I wrote. I want to do that. And at some point down the road, I want to do a Broadway musical, because it scares me," he said, laughing.

And, yes, he wants to have fun.

"I want to do a movie with a bunch of people, like we go to a resort hotel in the summer, you know, with everyone's family . . . and everybody stays at the same hotel and we go to work during the day and we have dinners at night. I'm looking for experiences as well as good stories - and if they can be combined into one, so much the better."

graye@phillynews.com
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