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Bryan Cranston is acknowledging his white privilege.
The Tony-winning actor has revealed that he stepped away from directing a comedy about the Ku Klux Klan and instead took a part in another play about Holocaust denial.
In 2019, the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles offered the actor, 65, an opportunity to direct. The play Cranston had in mind was a 1984 comedy called “The Foreigner,” by Larry Shue, about an Englishman who spoils a plot by the Ku Klux Klan to convert the Georgian fishing lodge where he’s staying into a Klan headquarters.
But the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter protests made Cranston change his mind.
“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,” he told The Los Angeles Times in a recent interview. “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.”
“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?” he continued. “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 instead the “Breaking Bad” star has taken on a part in another play called “Power of Sail.”
In it, he will play a Harvard professor who invites a Holocaust denier to an academic symposium and is surprised by students protesting the invitation.
“There need to be barriers, there need to be guard rails,” Cranston says about the issue of free speech. “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.”
Cranston seems to be committed to appearing in challenging material.
“A good play may not change your life, but it could change your day,” he explained. “To go deeper, a play can also stimulate the mind. It can make you question your thought process — your dogma. It could challenge you.”
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