CS Video: Trumbo Star Bryan Cranston and Director Jay Roach

Interview with Trumbo star Bryan Cranston and director Jay Roach

While Trumbo star Bryan Cranston will forever be remembered for his role as Walter White on AMC’s Breaking Bad, he’s also gotten kudos for playing real life people, most famously for playing President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) in the stage play “All the Way,” for which he won a Tony. 

Cranston once again plays a real person in the forthcoming biodrama, directed by Jay Roach (Fair Play), which looks at the fall of famed Hollywood screenplay Dalton Trumbo, whose acclaimed writing work was nearly silenced by Hollywood watchdog groups trying to out members of the film society who were involved with the Communist Party at the height of the Cold War. Trumbo ended up in jail and then blacklisted by the Hollywood studio system for his beliefs, not so much in the Communist Party as much as the right for one to not be judged and prejudiced against for them.

While this is a showcase for Cranston’s many talents, Roach has surrounded him with an amazing cast playing some of the biggest stars of that ear in Hollywood, including Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson, Helen Mirren as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and Louis CK and Alan Tudyk as Trumbo’s fellow writers Arlen Hirt and Ian McLellan Hunter. Other actors portray John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, the latter whom came to Trumbo while he was blacklisted to have him write Spartacus, which won the Academy Award for writing despite Trumbo not being able to put his own name on the screenplay. 

ComingSoon.net attended the Toronto International Film Festival junket where the film premiered and had a chance to talk with Roach and the Trumbo star about what it meant to tell this great screenwriter’s story. (Although we didn’t discuss it, Cranston and Roach are reuniting for an HBO movie based on the play “All the Way” with Cranston reprising his role. That will air in 2016.)

Trumbo opens in select cities on Friday, November 6.