Bryan Cranston Says It’s Good as Hell to Get Mad
Bryan Cranston has spent the past year on a bit of a break from television. Since last year, he's been playing Howard Beale in a stage adaptation of Network (first in London, now in New York), one of the best American movies ever made and one that's remarkably never stopped being relevant since it premiered in the late '70s. It's full of unforgettable rants and speeches, but the most iconic is easily Beale's famous, deranged on-air breakdown when he begs viewers to start saying, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
So, Stephen Colbert asked on Monday, what makes Cranston angry?
"I think what makes me angry," he replied, "is people accepting duplicity and the diminishment of integrity and the lack of accountability that we're finding in our society."
That's kind of a milquetoast, cautious answer that nonetheless got a lot of applause from the Late Show audience. It's also a little hard to take seriously when last October, just before the play of Network started running, Cranston was deriding critics of Donald Trump who hoped that the president would be a failure. But his follow-up is passionate and lucid, and a far cry from the pleading for civility that passes for much of politics these days:
There's a lot of discoveries an actor makes when developing a character, but one of the things I didn't quite pick up on in London but I'm really keying in on now is the social non-acceptance of the emotion of anger. To be mad. We accept intolerance, we accept irritability, we accept irascibility, and things like that, but anger, true anger, displayed socially, is not acceptable, and perhaps what we do need, as Howard Beale said, "First you've got to get mad." And when you're mad enough, then we'll figure out what to do with it. Then social change can actually take place, is when you get mad. And perhaps when you see injustice, like we do often these days, you don't want to be tolerant, you don't want to be accepting of that. You want to say, "No, this makes me angry, it is wrong, and we have to stand up and do something about it."
Maybe Cranston realized that Trump's "successes" involve putting kids in cages indefinitely, but regardless, he hits the nail on the head. There's no obligation to tolerate abuse and intolerance. And it's worth getting mad as hell when you see them.
