HOLLYWOOD tends to feel the same way about politics as Obama does about The Donald. Certainly, stars and executives may hold discreet, $50,000-a-plate fundraising dinners for favoured, usually Democrat, sons and daughters. Yes, its list of beloved films might include Mr Smith Goes to Washington. But as one can see from the epic squirming over what has been called the “so-white Oscars”, on account of all the best actor nominees being white, Tinseltown likes to keep its politics on the down low. Given what happened to Dalton Trumbo, it is painfully clear why.

The screenwriter who fell foul of Washington’s anti-Communist witch-hunt is the subject of Trumbo, a sparkling new drama out next week. Playing the Oscar-winner is Bryan Cranston, whose performance in the title role has earned him his first Academy Award nomination.

Cranston will find out on February 28 if he has beaten Leonardo DiCaprio, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Fassbender and Matt Damon. Having found fame at the age of 52 as chemistry teacher turned drug lord Walter White in Breaking Bad, the 59-year-old is living, grinning proof that life really can begin at a point when people used to put on slippers and hang up career hopes.

The Herald:

When we meet after the London Film Festival premiere of Trumbo, Cranston has a stinking cold. This is months before the Oscar nomination, but after a toasty critical reception for the picture he’s as happy as a chemistry teacher dining at a periodic table. Cheeky, too, as when he suckers me with all the ease of Walter White telling his wife that no, dear, there really is nothing she needs to worry about.

Beginning in late 1940s Hollywood and with a cast of characters that includes infamous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren), John Wayne and Edward G Robinson, Trumbo will be catnip to admirers of the period. But it’s not really about Hollywood, says Cranston. “It is about the over-stepping of political power and oppressing opinion. Exactly the opposite of what the country was supposed to stand for.”

The writer of Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was one of the best paid screenwriters in the world. He was also a Communist. In the picture, someone teases him about being a “swimming pool Soviet”. He was a Communist, moreover, at a time when America was paranoid about reds under every bed, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was on the rampage. HUAC came after Trumbo and some of his colleagues with a vengeance. Ahead lay blacklisting and worse. How, then, did Trumbo survive and go on to win Oscars for The Brave One and Roman Holiday, never mind become the writing genius behind Spartacus? Therein lies a fabulous tale.

The Herald:

The obvious question to ask Cranston is whether he would have crumbled in the face of HUAC pressure. “If I had children and a wife, and if faced with going to prison for a year, or lying and saying, ‘Oh yes, I’m sorry I joined the American Communist Party, it was a mistake, I was young, forgive me,' then they say, 'You’re fine, good,' I would probably do that. If that was the extent of it, but that wasn’t the extent of it.” 

What they wanted was for people to name names, incriminate others. That is where Cranston would draw the line. “Because they are using it to persecute and it’s an overstep, an overreach of governmental power. These are civil rights that need to be protected.”

Having covered Trumbo and his travels around Scotland (in his youth he trekked from Edinburgh to Aberdeen and on to the Hebrides: “Just great” ), it seems about time to move on to the elephantine presence in the room that is Walter White. One has to feel a smidgen of sympathy for actors who play a role so towering it fixes them in the public imagination for ever, even if they are paid silly money for doing so.

The Herald:

Playing the cancer-stricken White earned Cranston inclusion on a list of actors the New York Times said had turned television into art (also present was Scotland’s Kelly Macdonald for Boardwalk Empire). Cranston has a Golden Globe and Emmys galore for playing White. Yet as Trumbo and many other films and television shows demonstrate (Malcolm in the Middle, Argo, Larry Crowne, Drive, The Lincoln Lawyer, Seinfeld), he has been pretty good in other things too. But it is Walter who lives on among fans, including the one who came up to him at the Trumbo premiere dressed as the character. As far as Cranston is concerned, he has left Walter behind. 

“I don’t miss the character. I don’t miss him because it was so satisfying the way it wrapped up. I guess because I’m an actor, and I’m used to living in an ephemeral world where I live through experiences and move on, I don’t try to hold on. Because I know that I have another experience waiting for me. It’s like someone who goes on holiday and they hate to go home. I don’t, because I love work and I get to go and do that. But I also like to go on holiday. I’m not sad to leave anything.”

Breaking Bad first aired from 2008-13, during which viewers watched, in the words of the show’s writer-director, Vince Gilligan, Mr Chips turn into Scarface. The transformation was so perfectly calibrated as to be utterly believable. 

“It’s the writing,” says Cranston when I ask how he managed that. “Writers are the backbone, they are the foundation of performance art. The hardest work I’ve ever had to do has been on poorly written material, and the easiest work on well-written material because the guide posts are so clear. It washes over you and you know this is going to be fun to play, the twists and turns and ups and downs.”

He knew he was a Walter addict when he started dreaming about him. “It’s no different to reading a good novel, it just seeps into you, you daydream about what is going to happen and you look forward to going to bed every night to [find out] the next chapter.”

Cranston once said that Walter White could not have been possible without Tony Soprano. For the first time, the anti-hero was the hero. Walter had a further twist, though, in that the character went from good to bad. Cranston says he can understand what might tip someone into becoming a Walter, or as his alter ego was called, a Heisenberg. 

“What I learned from it … is that every person is capable of becoming dangerous. In Walter White the writers exposed his fears, his anxieties, his destiny, and presented them to the audience so that the aggregate condition he was facing at least made it plausible … that he could go into that life.”

While he reckons Tony Soprano made Walter possible, there is no such connection in his mind between Walter and the lovely, hapless Hal, dad to Malcolm in the hit comedy show Malcolm in the Middle. If there is a thread running through his career in the last few years, reckons Cranston, it is luck. “No career in the arts happens without a healthy dose of luck.”

Actors love to say such things. The reality usually involves more in the way of blood, sweat, tears and waiter jobs than luck. One might say this is particularly true with Cranston. If luck was handed out to those with less than perfect childhoods, he deserves every ounce of good fortune that has come his way. 

Born in March, 1956, in Los Angeles, Cranston was one of three children. Mother and father, actors both, couldn’t cope. She was an alcoholic, dad left when Cranston was 11 (they later reunited) and the family lost its home. The children were largely brought up by their mother and grandparents. I wonder if he looks on those beginnings as the making of him.

“I suppose that’s the healthy way to look [at it]. I try to. Would you like to have this as a childhood where your mother becomes an alcoholic and you don’t see your father? Well, no. I don’t want that for my child. The silver lining perhaps is that you know that only good writing, only good drama, comes from conflict. Without conflict there is no progression of story. So any time something bad happens to you, if there is a silver lining it is that you can go, ‘It’s going to be a good story.'”

He erupts with laughter. But didn’t such a childhood in some way show him how to act, how to try to fit in? 

“Hopefully. It kind of paralysed me for a number of years. Certainly through my middle school, high school years. I was very introverted and insecure. Then again maybe that helped me because I was very observant. Because I’m watching but I’m not actively participating because I’m too insecure. So it’s possible, yeah. Everything that happens in your life is a marker, and there is a lesson in their somewhere.”

Cranston has been married for almost 30 years to fellow actor Robin Dearden. Their 23-year-old daughter, Taylor, is also an actor. “She’s very talented and she’s got a good head on her shoulders so I’m not worried about her keeping a balance.”

Trumbo shows Cranston to be far more than Walter White, giant of popular culture though the character was. The same goes for All the Way, in which Cranston plays, with spellbinding accuracy, the American president Lyndon B Johnson. Cranston won a Tony Award when the play was on Broadway, and now HBO is turning it into a TV movie, out this year. Unsurprisingly, he is an all the way with LBJ guy. 

“If he were diagnosed today I think he would be bipolar. He had high highs and low lows. A tremendous work ethic. Tremendous ambition. Big ego. There is a lot of similarities between Dalton Trumbo and LBJ. Both quite exemplary at their work, both troubled, complex, conflicted. His accomplishments in America were almost unparalleled. As far as domestic accomplishments go maybe he is in the top five of all American presidents.”

We discuss whether LBJ could ever be elected president today. The strong southern drawl would be a problem, reckons Cranston, just because it is lazily and unfairly used by some as a shorthand for slow-wittedness. Hicks, I say. Yeah, hicks. “Where do the hicks come from in Scotland?” he asks. Like an eejit, I respond with a location which I’m obviously not daft enough to repeat here. 

He’s on it like a flash though, picking up my tape recorder and whispering into it, “Let’s make sure we get that.” Done up like a kipper, as they never said in Breaking Bad. Like I said, cheeky.

With his own production company and that Oscar nomination, he has plenty going on, including at least seven movies on the way, including The Infiltrator, a crime drama in which he plays a US customs agent on the trail of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, and Why Him?, a romantic comedy. 

I wonder if it wasn’t just success Cranston found late but something more than that – fearlessness. That believing he was only going this way once, and handed a chance with Breaking Bad, he went for it and triumphed. A writer, actor, director and producer, he admits that he likes to feel in control.

“But I don’t mind not being in control. As long as things are progressing, getting done. I feel that for some reason this is my time and I don’t want to waste the time, I know it will end, and when it ends I want to be able to go, ‘I have no regrets. I’m exhausted. I’m proud of the work I’ve done and hopefully proud of the person I am.'”

Then it’s someone else’s turn, he adds. But not yet. Not yet.

Trumbo (15) opens in cinemas on February 5.