Bryan Cranston of the hit TV show Breaking Bad said he came to terms with both his “white blindness” and privilege in an interview this week, also calling for “barriers” to free speech.
According to Cranston, he signed on to play a professor who supports free speech and contends that more speech is the answer to “hate speech” after looking inward and examining his shortcomings as a white man during the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder.
“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?” the actor said of the revelation.
“There need to be barriers, there need to be guard rails,” Cranston said 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,” he told the interviewer.
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Cranston said he was originally offered the opportunity to direct a show at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse. The show, Larry Shue’s 1984 The Foreigner, is a comedy about spoiling the Ku Klux Klan’s plans to turn a Georgia fishing lodge into a meeting place for the racist group.
Recalling his decision to decline the offer, he said he realized, “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.”
“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.”
“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,” he said of the show.
Instead, with his new realizations, Cranston took on the lead role of Charles Nichols in Power of Sail.
According to the interviewer, the show is about a Harvard professor who faces “backlash for inviting a white nationalist and Holocaust denier” to speak at a symposium. The professor is of the belief that “the answer to hate speech is more speech.”
Cranston’s character’s “white privilege prevents him from seeing the very real harm caused by his actions until it is much too late,” the interviewer wrote.
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In the past, Cranston tweeted his worries about the sanity of Trump supporters: “I’ve stopped worrying about the president’s sanity. He’s not sane. And the realization of his illness doesn’t fill me with anger, but with profound sadness. What I now worry about is the sanity of anyone who can still support this deeply troubled man to lead our country,” the actor wrote in 2020.
I’ve stopped worrying about the president’s sanity. He’s not sane. And the realization of his illness doesn’t fill me with anger, but with profound sadness. What I now worry about is the sanity of anyone who can still support this deeply troubled man to lead our country.
— Bryan Cranston (@BryanCranston) April 25, 2020
