Long before he was Walter White, Bryan Cranston was wanted for murder…
Having recently announced that he will be taking a break from acting, Bryan Cranston AKA Walter White AKA Heisenberg AKA the dad from Malcom In The Middle has revealed a detail from his past that makes us wonder how hard it was for him to tap into his most notorious characters. Speaking on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast the actor claimed that he was once a wanted fugitive, albeit unbeknownst to himself at the time…
Back in the 70s, Cranston and his brother were travelling around the US and stopped in at Florida for a while. Here, they worked 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…” Cranston said in the interview. “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?” adding that staff members had 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.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR_Spjj7zH4
He and his brother soon left the job to continue travelling. “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,” he said.
Wong’s body was later found in the trunk of a car and people pointed their fingers at the Cranston brothers. “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.
The real culprits were arrested before police caught up with Cranston, with the accused pleading guilty and later dying in prison. Still, a close brush with the law for a man whose characters would become synonymous for breaking it… except for maybe Hal.
