We’ve seen Bryan Cranston lose everything before. In perhaps the greatest episode of television ever produced, Breaking Bad’s horrifying “Ozymandias”, everything that Walter White has built over the previous five seasons slips from his fingers. While the ending of the show does offer a glimmer of a locked goodness within him, it is by far a redemption for the broken man—leaving Cranston wondering what it would look like for a man to actually climb out of that hole, and if there is still hope to be found at rock bottom.
Enter Your Honor season two, the final season of which premieres on Starzplay in the Middle East on Monday, January 14., a curious thing. After all, the show was originally intended to be a limited series, telling the story of a judge who abandons his principles to save his son, and subsequently watches everything he built fall apart.
But why does the story have to end there? That’s what kept Cranston, the series’ star and executive producer, up at night.
“Peter Moffat, our showrunner from the first season, wanted to do a story where a man loses his principles for what he thinks is the right reason—to protect his son’s life. He bends his own moral compass and breaks it basically. He becomes a criminal. And all for naught. It ends in a very tragic way. Everything that he was trying to do, he failed at,” Cranston tells Esquire Middle East.
Cranston couldn’t leave it that way. For him, there’s still hope. We’ve seen him play a man who loses everything before—twice. Your Honor season two, instead, is the first time we’ve seen him crawl back out of the ashes, and it’s some of the best work of his career.
“The second season is about redemption. What happens to a person who fails at their moral integrity? who fails at being humanistic and in, in his goodness? Is there life after despair, and grief? And what would that life be? We don’t know,” Cranston continues.
“It’s an exploration into what happens to a human being after they feel they’ve lost everything. And he did. He lost his son, he lost his wife, he lost his principles. He lost his occupation, his friends, his moral standing his society, everything. He wanted to die. So hopefully it’ll resonate with people who are experiencing those things. And if they feel that there’s a kindred spirit there, they wonder, how did he handle this? Then hopefully they can gain something,” he continues.
“I have felt the same way in despair and grief. You wonder, is there is there any measure of hope that comes out of it? And that’s the journey.”
Cranston has always been a man fueled by hope. After all, while he is now universally considered one of the greatest actors to ever live, he was once a man in his late 20s, with a father who had tried to be an actor, who grew up in the ruin of that failure, who decided oh so boldly that he would give it a shot himself.
That’s something that Cranston wrestled with, and something that taught him a valuable lesson. He knew that the only way he would succeed is if he wasn’t doing it for anyone else but himself.
“I had to make sure that I was doing it for me, and not for to fulfill something that a promise that they started but didn’t complete. I didn’t want to do it for that. I wanted to do it felt right for me individually,” Cranston tells us.
Cranston had to dig deep into himself to play Michael Desiato’s journey. We’ll give you one spoiler: If you don’t give up on yourself, there will always be hope.
Season 2 of Your Honor premieres on January 14 on Starzplay. Watch it here.
See more from Bryan Cranston in the latest edition of Esquire Weekend
