Bryan Cranston has a fascinating profile in the Los Angeles Times to promote his lead role in the play Power of Sail. How he came to star in the play is a somewhat long conversation within the LAT piece, but it’s a story about how Cranston, a 65-year-old white American actor, realized he needed to do different kinds of art and challenge himself to be better and more inclusive. In 2019, he was set to direct a version of Larry Shue’s 1984 comedy The Foreigner, “about an Englishman who foils a nefarious plot by the Ku Klux Klan to convert the Georgia fishing lodge where he’s staying into a Klan meeting place.” The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice movements in the past two-years-plus changed the way he thought about that play and now this play, Power of Sail. PoS is about a Harvard professor who invites a white nationalist and Holocaust denier to speak at the university. Backlash ensues, and Cranston’s professor character finds himself in the middle of a culture clash and generational class. Some highlights from the interview:

Why he took the role in Power of Sail: “I’m 65 years old now, and I need to learn, I need to change.”

On the BLM protests in 2020: As those occurrences shook the world, they also transformed Cranston, who says in these troubling years he came face to face with his own “white blindness” and privilege. It was necessary work for a man tasked with playing a character whose white privilege prevents him from seeing the very real harm caused by his actions until it is much too late.

Why he ended up leaving the gig directing The Foreigner: “It is a privileged viewpoint to be able to look at the Ku Klux Klan and laugh at them and belittle them for their broken and hateful ideology. But the Ku Klux Klan and Charlottesville and white supremacists — that’s still happening and it’s not funny. It’s not funny to any group that is marginalized by these groups’ hatred, and it really taught me something.”

He had been laughing at The Foreigner for years: Cranston says he had been laughing at the play for decades and he had to confront the fact that his white privilege allowed him to laugh. “And I realized, ‘Oh my God, if there’s one, there’s two, and if there’s two, there are 20 blind spots that I have … what else am I blind to? If we’re taking up space with a very palatable play from the 1980s where rich old white people can laugh at white supremacists and say, ‘Shame on you,’ and have a good night in the theater, things need to change, I need to change.” So he stepped aside, telling Shakman, “If you find a play that you need an old white guy to act in, then maybe I can be available for that.”

On The Power of Sail’s main thesis, which is that some POVs are too hateful & offensive to platform and amplify: “There need to be barriers, there need to be guard rails. If someone wants to say the Holocaust was a hoax, which is against history … to give a person space to amplify that speech is not tolerance. It’s abusive.”

On the younger generation’s use of “safe” and “safe spaces”: “What is safe? Well, emotionally safe. Without judgment, safe. All-inclusive, safe. Empathetic, safe. And that’s what gives me hope with new generations. Because it’s a beautiful thing to say, ‘We’re all entitled to be who we are without judgment.’”

[From The LA Times]

There was part of me worried that Cranston had come to these realizations after he was caught up in some kind of racist scandal, and perhaps he was just trying to get ahead of it. But no, it doesn’t sound like that at all. It sounds like what people actually want from white folks and Boomers: we want them to continue to listen, grow, learn and to understand their privilege. Cranston is actually trying to improve and examine his own privilege and stop making art which could be viewed as tone-deaf.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.