Bryan Cranston nearly “broke bad” in real life, too.
The “Breaking Bad” star opened up about his wild 20s, which involved near-misses with murder, during Tuesday’s episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson‘s “Dinner’s on Me” podcast.
Cranston, 67, told an anecdote about traveling the country with his brother Kyle in the ’70s when they stopped in Florida. There, they got jobs as waiters in a restaurant called the Hawaiian Inn, where one of their co-workers was a “cantankerous” chef named Pete Wong.
“There was just no way on earth you were ever going to get on his good side . . . We’d all discuss how rotten and mean Peter Wong is, and we’d all discuss, if one were to do away with Peter Wong, how would one do it?” Cranston said, noting how some fellow staffers jokingly suggested the use of a “meat grinder” or hitting him over the head with “his own wok.”
“We would laugh,” he said. “You’re in a kitchen, there’s a million ways to kill someone in a kitchen.”
But, soon after Cranston and his brother left Florida to continue their travels, “Little did we know that right at the time we said goodbye and left the job, Peter Wong went missing. He was not found for a week, week and a half, two weeks,” the Emmy-winning actor said.
When his body was found in the trunk of a car, people pointed fingers at Cranston.
“Little did we know they put out an APB [all-points bulletin] on us and to find us, we were somewhere in the Carolinas, I think, at that point,” he revealed.
However, the real culprits were arrested before police found the Cranstons (Billy Wayne Waughtel and two accomplices were arrested for the murder. Waughtel later pleaded guilty and was killed in prison, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal.)
This wasn’t Cranston’s only real-life brush with the topic of murder, either.
The actor — who was married to Mickey Middleton from 1977 to 1982, and has been married to Robin Dearden (with whom he has daughter Taylor Dearden, 31) since 1989 — shared that after his divorce from Middleton, he met a woman who was “assertive, and in command [and] beautiful.” The two had a “very hot and heavy romance,” he said.
However, after learning she had drug problems, he broke it off. But, it didn’t end there.
While he was on the soap opera “Loving,” he decided to see her again as “friends” in New York City.
“We were drinking and we were eating, and she made this beautiful meal and then it started turning. She started talking like, we’re still together. Yeah. And I went, ‘Oh, I’ve made a mistake,’ ” he said.
After that, she showed up on the set of the soap, when he was filming.
” ‘You thought that you can just walk out on me. Is that what you thought? You thought you can just walk out and leave me alone,’ ” she said, according to Cranston.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is a soap opera!’ “
He said their relationship “devolved from there,” and he had a “vision of killing her.”
“I went to a different place,” he said. “You know, they used to call it ‘seeing red.’ And all you see is emotion, and rage, and fear and anxiety . . . and the moment that I snapped out of this, she was, in my mind, I had already killed her. And I was so afraid of myself. At that moment that I went, ‘Oh my God, what is happening to me?’ “
Ferguson interjected. “You finally shook it, but yeah, I can imagine.”
