Why Bryan Cranston had to go large to capture Dalton Trumbo - ‘He was a very flamboyant man’
Cranston didn’t want to make the bullish and opinionated Trumbo a cartoon, but he didn’t want to do this larger-than-life figure a disservice, so he jumped right in at the deep end
Bryan Cranston had to play it big in Trumbo because, well, Dalton Trumbo was big.
The Hollywood screenwriter, blacklisted in the late 1940s but determined to keep his family fed and clothed by cranking out screenplays under a cloak of pseudonyms, was a force to be reckoned with. He was bullish and voluble. He smoked. He drank. He was not shy with his opinions.
“He was a very flamboyant man,” Cranston says, “and I was concerned, because of the cigarette holder, because he had this lilt to his speech – he would go up and then he’d go down – and because of the bird on his shoulder.”
SEE ALSO: Academy Award nominations: The Revenant leads list with 12 nods while Star Wars sequel is snubbed for Best Picture
Yes, a bird – a parrot named Sammy, given to Trumbo by Kirk Douglas. Trumbo, which got an Academy Award nomination for its star, is not the story of a humble, retiring gent.
For Cranston, that represented a tricky balance: how to play this larger-than-life figure so he still appears true-to-life? Not an exaggeration, not a cartoon.
“He was big, he was theatrical, he was dramatic,” the actor says, speaking in September at the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And he loved the idea of people listening to his wordsmith musings. So, at the risk of jumping into the deep end and being swallowed up, I thought that was the only way you can play him. Big.”
Cranston, 60, who started in TV in the 1980s (among his many credits: Tim Whatley, Dentist to the Stars, in several seasons of Seinfeld), has certainly played big before.