It isn't always easy being a TV star. Just ask Bryan Cranston, who blew into town this week to promote "Malcolm in the Middle," the Fox hit on which he plays the dad.
Not that he was complaining about the schedule that brought him into town late at night, got him up early to do KSTU-Ch. 13's early morning newscast and then rushed him off to Florida for a similarly brief stop."I am totally running on adrenaline right now," he said.
But doing publicity is but a minor inconvenience compared to the challenges of "Malcolm." Like this past Sunday's episode, which called for his character, Hal, to be a former disco skating champion -- and called for Cranston to demonstrate those skills.
"The last time I skated I had metal wheels. They had to hire a person to help me learn to skate," Cranston said. A stunt double, of course, did the cartwheels and such, but the actor mastered the skating well enough to slide through the turns and even do splits.
"It took a while to learn to do it, but the great thing about being an actor is that we get an opportunity for a short period of time to simulate mastering something," he said. "It's like a magic trick. The illusion is that I really know what I'm doing, and the truth is I don't."
Skating pales in comparison to what Cranston was asked to do for the episode that airs on Sunday (7:30 p.m., Ch. 13.
"(Executive producer) Linwood Boomer asked me, 'How do you feel about bees?' " Cranston said. "I said, 'Fine . . . why?' "
The script Boomer was cooking up called for young genius Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) to enter a contest in which he would build a robot that would try to disable the other contestants' robots. His father really gets into it and starts offering his own suggestions -- including having a swarm of bees shoot out of the robot and attack the opponent.
And that script called for Cranston to end up covered in more than 100,000 bees.
"I said, 'You're kidding. You want to do what ?' " he said. 'And once I got objective about it, and thought, 'Boy, that'd be funny,' I said yes to it strictly on the idea that it'd be funny."
A professional bee wrangler was brought on the set, and he covered Cranston with pheromones to attract the bees -- and then with the insects themselves.
"He loaded them on, and all of a sudden the bees are all over me. A hundred thousand bees. They weighed, like, 25 pounds," he said. "I had to have it on for an hour. So bees are crawling in my eyes and over my nose. It looked like I had armor on. It was amazing."
He got stung twice, but it didn't hurt much because he pretty much expected it and there was no surprise.
Cranston is considerably more surprised -- "amazingly surprised" -- that "Malcolm in the Middle" has turned into a hit.
"After 20 years as an actor, you just don't allow yourself to get so hopeful because there's so much disappointment in this occupation. I take it all with a grain of salt," he said. "And that's what I'm trying to let the kids on our show know, too, that this is a lucky break and we should all be very grateful and know that we're very fortunate. Because it doesn't happen often. I've done probably eight pilots (that didn't become series) and had two series on the air -- one lasted six episodes and one was nine."
Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek play the parents of four boys: Malcolm is a pint-sized genius; his three brothers are considerably less than brilliant. But it has struck a chord with audiences.
"When everything gets in alignment properly, it's really a lucky thing and rare," said Cranston, who gives most of the credit to the show's creator, Boomer.
"He attracted writers who saw the same way he did -- in a quirky, odd, bent sort of way but still it has a sensibility of familial values," he said. "When you look at it, it's bizarre and quirky and chaotic. And yet there's a through-line in every episode of family and togetherness and, basically, a family struggling to make it through. And that's what I think is resonating with people."
The actors deserve no small degree of credit themselves, however. Cranston and Kaczmarek are perfectly cast; Muniz is amazing; and the other three young actors (Christopher Kennedy Masterson, Justin Berfield and Erik Per Sullivan) all come across as real kids.
"They're regular boys," Cranston said. "When we have breaks, we throw the football around and they steal one of the golf carts and drive around the lot and bring their dog to work. It's really normal."
While some have opined that Hal is sort of the dumb, disconnected Dad, Cranston doesn't see him or play him that way. (And Hal is certainly smart enough not to let himself be driven crazy by the insanity going on in his house.)
"I wouldn't want to make him dumb," he said. "Occasionally, he could be obtuse or at least construed to be obtuse."
He patterns the character on three TV/movie icons. First, Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons." ("He had kind of a softer side.") Second, Andy Griffith. ("He also had kind of a sweetness to him.")
And, finally, Danny Kaye as Walter Mitty. ("That's where I got Hal's sensibility.")
"What was bothering me from the start was they were depicting him as being dim-witted or out of it," Cranston said. "I wanted to make it clear with Linwood and with the writers that it's OK for me to have him be distracted, but not disinterested. I will not play disinterested in my family. I won't do it."
Not that he has any complaints about the show's writing.
"The most underrated entity, certainly, in Hollywood is the writing. Actors know that," Cranston said. "As Paul Newman said, 'An Oscar-winning performance is written, not performed.' And I read this stuff and I laugh out loud. And that's rare that I can read a script now, after 22 years in the business, and laugh out loud and enjoy it and wonder what's going to happen like a fan. It's really remarkable that I had this gift come to me."