An Actor's Actor

Quick, without Googling, who has won the Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series for the past two years?

If you said Hugh Laurie ("House"), good guess. Wrong, but a good guess.

Try again? Jon Hamm ("Mad Men")? Another reasonable guess, but also wrong.

(Digression: We think Hugh Laurie deserves whatever accolades he gets. Jon Hamm, on the other hand, we don't quite get. The show is great, and he's perfectly fine in it. But he's essentially playing a cipher, a mystery man, someone that nobody can quite put a finger on. He plays it well, but this essentially calls for him to show very little emotion and to have almost no reaction to anything. So the part really demands that Jon Hamm say his lines clearly and look pretty. The Solipsist could do that! EOD)

The correct answer, in fact, is Bryan Cranston for the AMC series "Breaking Bad."

(Image from imdb.com)

If you're not familiar with the series, "Breaking Bad" revolves around Walter White (Cranston), a low-key but brilliant high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico, who finds out (in the pilot episode) that he has lung cancer and, perhaps, two years to live. With a disabled son at home and a baby on the way, he decides the best way to stockpile cash to provide for his family is to manufacture methamphetamine. He partners with a drug dealer, a former student named Jesse (Aaron Paul), and soon, thanks to his expertise with chemistry, is producing the best meth that anyone has ever used. Along the way, he must hide his new profession from his wife and brother-in-law (who happens to be a DEA agent) and try not to get himself killed by the more experienced players in the meth trade.

The show itself is compelling, but what makes it work is Cranston. He is the proverbial "actor's actor." We never really understood what that kind of label meant--actor's actor, writer's writer, plumber's plumber (well, OK, we could guess what that LAST one would mean). Watching Bryan Cranston, though, we get it.

Bryan Cranston is certainly a good actor. What makes him special, though, is not so much his ability to "disappear" into a character (along the lines of someone like Sean Penn), nor is it his ability to craft a character through the careful accumulation of bits and pieces (along the lines of Johnny Depp). Not that Cranston doesn't do these things, but what he does as well as any actor the Solipsist has ever seen is commit to a role.

When we studied theater, the one thing every acting teacher advised was to "make a strong choice and commit to it." Since the Solipsist has never been a "method" actor, we always took this to mean that you should never let self-consciousness get in the way: If you're playing someone in physical agony, you better scream; if you're supposed to pick your nose onstage, you don't fake it, you do it (sorry).

In anything Bryan Cranston does, he does it 100% and with no hint of self-consciousness. When he played the father, Hal, in "Malcolm in the Middle," he was essentially playing a human cartoon character. This called on him to do things like dance around his living room in tighty-whiteys and imitate Indiana Jones while running through a big-box retail store. In "Breaking Bad," although it is a much more dramatic role, he has also found himself in bizarre situations: In the pilot, our first image of him is driving an RV while wearing nothing but a gas mask and underwear. He ultimately pulls over, composes himself enough to put on a shirt (he's lost his pants) and begins making a "suicide video" for his unborn daughter. It's a long story.

To any aspiring actors out there, we simply encourage you, if ever faced with an acting challenge that makes you feel uneasy or embarrassed, take a page from Bryan Cranston. Make the strongest choice you can think of. And commit to it.