Bryan Cranston
Luck is a component that a lot of people in the arts sometimes fail to recognise: that you can have talent, perseverance, patience, but without luck you will not have a successful career.Collection: Patience
I have some anger issues.Collection: Anger
The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.Collection: Imagination
We've been trained since kindergarten: Be nice, be kind, share, put on a smile. So we're conditioned to squash our natural selfish instincts, and that's the right thing for society.Collection: Smile
Mixing humor and politics is something that works.Collection: Humor
Danger is cool.Collection: Cool
Love is not as important as good health. You cannot be in love if you're not healthy. You can't appreciate it.Collection: Health
Every experience feeds an actor, and I've learned that depression is all around us.
The TV business is like the produce section of the market. Today everything is fresh and glistening and firm. And tomorrow, when they find a bruise on you, they toss you out.
When you're an actor in grade school, high school, college, whatever, you start to realize what you're really good at, what you're kinda good at, what you're okay at, and you start to compartmentalize. But if you know yourself and what you're capable of, it's just a matter of opportunity.
Our whole society is instantaneous.
Actors are inherently self-centered.
I love acting because it's empowering. It empowers me.
I'm not crazy about being out of control, and I get emotional when things are unclean. When things are out of order. When things are messy. Because I lived in a mess as a child.
You don't want to be a Kardashian.
I can tell you for sure: people who are at their peak right now will not sustain that. You can't. It's against the law of nature.
I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.
People would love to be rich, but they're looking for the easy way. Who wouldn't want to win the lottery? Just to score.
The only thing that we as actors really can control is to be able to say 'yes' or 'no' to the material.
This self-congratulatory notion Americans have that their country is Number One is borne of ignorance and bad manners.
It's up to the actor to make sure they don't get typecast.
There are far more talented people doing voice work than I.
Viewers can determine what they want to watch and what they don't want to watch.
If you like vanilla, you're not going to like 'Breaking Bad' - you need to like a specific flavor that is unusual, that is different, that takes risks.
I learned long ago to focus on things you can control and don't even pay attention to things you don't.
I look like everyone.
At my age, I don't think anyone is untouched by cancer.
I'm pretty handy! I do a lot of things around the house, and I actually enjoy it.
You need to tell the truth to the audience, or they will throw a brick through the TV. They'll turn you off.
I have a lovely family who supports me and it's great.
Money has never been my primary goal.
I think naturally, if you're an actor, there's a high level of assertiveness that you need to have to survive this business. There's boldness in being assertive, and there's strength and confidence.
There's so many things that can go wrong in the execution of a project like a television show or a movie, so many little elements, any number of things, all the way to marketing - like they could market it poorly and nobody finds it and down it goes.
In order to be an actor you really have to be one of those types of people who are risk-takers and have what is considered an actor's arrogance, which is not to say an arrogance in your personal life. But you have to be the type of person who wants the ball with seconds left in the game.
If you're a person who complains about everything all the time, then you're just the boy who cried 'wolf.' But if you do it on occasion and about the right reasons, then people listen.
My passion is becoming involved in good work, whether that means as an actor or writer or director or producer or all - that is not as important to me.
Given the right set of circumstances any one of us could become dangerous - so why not show that in our programmes?
Any kind of civil rights oppression is wrong.
It's mind-altering when you slip into someone else's shoes. That's psychedelic, man.
You get addicted to emotions. Our endorphins kick in and it's like a high. On the low end you might love roller coasters. On the high end you might be a bank robber or something.
I admit, I do a lot of projects, but it's because I'm in a position now where I'm reading a lot more scripts and plays and things, and I'm really listening to offers and trying to think what I want to do at any given time.
I intend to do more directing TV.
Something's happened in our society which I don't think is beneficial, and that's that you see the public being fed box-office news. Newscasts now, every local station - I've been traveling around the country a lot, and you see the local news, and they give box-office reports.
What's great about well-written material is, if you can shock with justifiable actions, that's the best.
If you have a level of expectation in your life that you have to be a quote-unquote star, whatever that means, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
It used to be that people would watch TV shows because they knew the characters would stay the same. Whether it's Archie Bunker or it's Thomas Magnum you watch it because it's like, 'I'm comfortable, this is the same guy.'
When I was a kid there were a very select few channels - programmes had to have more of a large appeal and they just didn't offer very much. Now you have a situation where the television world has expanded and there's hundreds of channels.
I have talked to stunt drivers all my life, 32 years of talking to stunt drivers. There's a craziness to them.
Bad for the sake of bad is boring to me and not believable.
Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.