Writer Peter Moffat needed someone to play a morally upstanding judge forced to set aside his ethics to protect the life of his son. The obvious answer? Bryan Cranston.
“I think it was incredibly important to cast somebody who, as a starting point, feels like a decent human being,” the Your Honor showrunner told V.F. in a recent interview. “I think Bryan has that. It’s just something innate.”
Moffat also needed a star who was able to express an “agile intelligence,” especially since the character has to juggle countless lies and misdirections in an effort to keep his son safe. “That pressure is unimaginable on somebody who is less smart, who can’t think as fast,” he said. “And Bryan has that.”
Or maybe not, as Cranston joked in a separate interview. “When you see me with that consternation on my face, I’m actually going, ‘Chinese or Mexican tonight?’” he said with a laugh.
Set in New Orleans, Your Honor marks Cranston’s first steady television work since Breaking Bad. On the Showtime limited series, which airs through the end of January, Cranston plays Michael Desiato, a judge whose son (Hunter Doohan) kills a mobster’s child in a hit-and-run accident. The tragedy forces Michael to compromise his ethics at every turn, covering up the death of one boy to protect the life of his own.
“That’s what interested me,” Cranston explained. “The premise itself, the idea of how far would a parent go to protect the life of their child—that’s every parents’ nightmare. To lose control of your number one responsibility, protecting your child—that was an easy hook.”
Your Honor debuted in December, around the same time Cranston and the crew returned to New Orleans to finish work on its final two episodes. The coronavirus pandemic had affected not just the production—which was forced to go into an extended hiatus back in the spring—but Cranston: he and his wife, Robin Dearden, were both diagnosed with COVID-19 in March. Each came down with mild symptoms; Cranston said his senses of taste and smell didn’t return for a couple of months.
Ahead, Cranston tells V.F. about his reasons for returning to television, and explains what it’s really like for an actor to work during a pandemic.
Vanity Fair: Why did you want to do this show as your return to television?
Bryan Cranston: For me, it holds great promise in the sense that it’s classified as a limited series. In truth, it could just be this one season. It could be for two seasons. It could possibly be for three seasons, but I don’t think so. So unlike what we’re all used to—going into a season of television and hoping that you’re able to stay on and continue your story, and each year the writers get together and figure out what to do with the characters—this had the structure right from the beginning.
But then you have to execute. You have to write this out to make the ups and downs and near misses and hits and victories and losses and the slippery slope of all that—you have to be able to execute that in 10 episodes. I think Peter Moffat did a brilliant job in putting this all together and figuring out the puzzle pieces so that it’s naturally tragic in many ways, and thrilling in so many other ways. And it addresses the central moral issue: are we bound to morality if something threatens one of our own? Can we pause morality to take care of something, and then jump back in? Is that the way it works? The ambiguity of that is really interesting to me. Can you dance with the devil and then say, Okay, I had to do that for certain reasons, and now I’m going back to the straight and narrow? Is that the way it works?
Peter told me how detail-oriented you are, down to even the punctuation of certain lines. When you get a script, where do you start? What are you looking for when you first read a screenplay?