Bryan Cranston says there’s a lot of his father in his latest stage role, playing Joseph Keller, the patriarch of Arthur Miller’s 1947 tragedy All My Sons.
He was “an incredibly handsome man”, he jokes, before expanding on their relationship later in life.
Cranston tells Sky News: “I remember taking my father to therapy once. And he recited back to me and my siblings. We thought this was a great breakthrough [that we’d be] able to finally talk about his past and the war.
“It wasn’t that way. He was too closed down. He quoted Oedipus. I don’t think he realised it, but he did. He said: ‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than go through that again.’ It’s like, that’s how painful it was.”
It wasn’t the ideal father-son relationship, with Joseph Cranston, a jobbing actor and scriptwriter, walking out on his family when Bryan was just 11.
They would reconnect years later and stay in contact until Joseph’s death in 2014, aged 90, but the damage had been done.
Now 70 himself, with a daughter (Taylor Deardon, also an actor, currently starring in medical drama The Pitt), Cranston has drawn on his father’s memory to play Joe Keller, a self-made businessman who justifies his wrongdoing in the play as necessary for success.
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“There’s a lot of my father in this character that I play. I just plucked him and said, ‘Come with me’. And we’re on stage together…
“It’s like, that’s my character there. And ironically, my father’s name was Joe.”
Would his father have recognised himself?
“I hope that he would be able to see it. But you know, it’s easier to see other people in someone else than it is yourself.”
‘It’s an actor’s sin to judge your character’
Cranston stars in the National Theatre production opposite Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays his wife Kate Keller. Although born in south London, she has lived in LA for more than two decades.
With the play famously deconstructing the American Dream, is the current polarisation of politics in the US something that is feeding into their performance?
Jean-Baptiste says not: “I think you can’t play to that. You’re aware of it, obviously, but we just play the truth of the characters, their relationships, their experiences.”
Cranston agrees: “It’s an actor’s sin to judge your character… We have to stay subjective and let the audience feel that… If we have them talking when they’re leaving the theatre and still feeling it, we’ve really done our job.”
‘Post-truth era – it makes me shiver’
Jean-Baptiste gained widespread recognition and an Oscar nomination for her role in Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets And Lies, themes both central to this play.
But in our post-truth era, where lies can be reframed as alternative facts, are the secrets and lies in the play open for fresh interpretation?
Jean-Baptiste says that’s the beauty of a play: “No two people are going to have the same experience. Different things are going to resonate with different people.
“I never argue with anybody when they come to see a play [and say] ‘Oh, that was about that’. I’m interested and intrigued by why they thought it, but it’s theirs.”
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Cranston agrees that art is so subjective, no one can be wrong. But he couches that with a word of warning for the play’s modern audience.
“Post-truth era, it makes me shiver. But it’s true that the perception of the truth is even more powerful than the truth itself. And that’s a scary thing.”
All My Sons, directed by Ivo van Hove, releases to cinemas worldwide through NT Live from 16 April.
