Everything Bryan Cranston touches is turning to awards at the moment, not least his theatrical interpretation of US President Lyndon B. Johnson in All The Way. That stage play, freshly garlanded in Tonys and other such trinkets, has just been picked up by HBO Films and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television.
A Broadway debut for Cranston, the play charts the troubled first year of the Johnson administration. There’s the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the small matter of Vietnam rumbling on ever more loudly, and the quest to pass a ground-breaking civil rights bill. Oh, and the small matter of an election to win.
Plenty, in other words, for the actor to get his teeth into in a TV movie that will be dramatised by original playwright Robert Schenkkan, a writer who clearly has a feel for the corridors of power and Cold War US foreign policy. He also has a pre-existing relationship with Spielberg and HBO, having penned four episodes of The Pacific.
As rumours (likely false) of a Walter White cameo in AMC’s Better Call Saul refuse to go away, Cranston will be seen in Jay Roach’s Dalton Trumbo biopic, Trumbo, playing the persecuted screenwriter, and after that, Errol Morris’s feature debut Holland, Michigan.
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