Bryan Cranston’s Chaotic 20s: How He Became a Murder Suspect and Was Targeted by a Scorned Lover on a Soap Set

Bryan Cranston opens up about the crazy brush with murder he’s had throughout his life.

On Tuesday’s episode of Jesse Tyler Ferguson Dinner is on me podcast, the Breaking Bad The alum delved into the chaos of his early 20s and shared several anecdotes that indirectly involved murder.

Over a meal of poke and salmon curry, Cranston, 67, recalled a trip across the country with his brother Kyle sometime in the mid-’70s when they stopped in Florida. Lacking funds, the couple made a brief stop in the Sunshine State to raise funds and take jobs as waiters at a restaurant called the Hawaiian Inn.

In the introduction to the story, he explained that the restaurant was run by a “caustic” chef named Peter Wong who “just hated everything.”

Bryan Cranston. Jemal Countess/Getty Images Bryan Cranston admits he mistook James Corden for a waiter during their first meeting at an LA restaurant

“There was just no way you were ever going to get on his good side. But he loved the ladies. And so all the men knew, oh, if we had a problem in the kitchen, we had to send them in,” added Cranston, noting that Wong was “terrible” and that the staff often had meetings where they joked about ways they would plan to get rid of him.

“We’d all argue about how corrupt and evil Peter Wong is, and we’d all argue that if someone were to get rid of Peter Wong… how would they do it?” he recalled, sharing how some jokingly suggested using a “meat grinder” or hitting him over the head with “his own wok.”

“We would laugh”, the Malcolm in the middle said the star. “You’re in the kitchen, there’s a million ways to kill someone in the kitchen.”

Soon it was time for the Cranstons to move on and they headed “up north” with plans to go “all the way to Maine and on our motorcycles.”

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“Well, we didn’t even know that Peter Wong was missing just as we said goodbye and left work. He wasn’t found for a week, a week and a half, two weeks,” he said. The actor revealed that the chef always carried a “bundle of money” with him even on the dog track.

One day a “young lady in a honey trap” approached him and took him back to “a house or something” when someone knocked him over the head and robbed him. Later, they put his body in the “trunk of a car”. Homicide investigators then entered the restaurant to question those who worked with him. When asked if anyone mentioned harming Wong, it was pointed to the Cranston brothers who happened to have left town at the time of the murder.

“We didn’t know they issued a warrant [all-points bulletin] on us and for them to find us, we were somewhere in the Carolinas, I think at that point,” he reflected, thinking about how things would have turned out if “someone had actually pulled us to the ground with guns blazing.”

Fortunately, before the police could track them down, investigators put the “pieces” together and arrested the real culprits who killed Wong after interviewing witnesses and collecting surveillance tapes. (Billy Wayne Waughtel and two accomplices were arrested for the murder, and Waughtel later pleaded guilty but was killed in prison, according to Daytona Beach News-Journal.)

Bryan Cranston. LA/ABC Group via Getty Images Bryan Cranston says ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ movie would be a fun reunion

Cranston also told how he once again came in contact with the murder.

Shortly after the breakup of his first marriage, the actor recalled going to an audition where he met a woman who was “intrusive and bossy.” [and] beautiful.” Despite the “very hot and heavy romance” the two shared “right away,” he decided to break up after learning she had a drug problem.

After their breakup, Cranston got a job in the so-called soap opera love in New York and arranged to see her for dinner as “friends”.

“We were drinking and eating and she made a beautiful meal, and then it started spinning. She started talking like we were still together. Yeah. And I said, ‘Oh, I was wrong,'” he said.

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Later on the set of the soap opera, Cranston got a rude awakening when she showed up on set with her “arms crossed” and started confronting him.

“You thought, you thought you could just walk away from me. Is that what you thought? You thought you could just walk away and leave me alone,” he recalled of her confrontation. “Is that right? And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is soap opera.'”

Cranston continued, sharing how their relationship “went from there.” In the end, he admitted, he even had “a vision of killing her.”

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“I went to another place,” he explained. “You know, they used to call it seeing red. And all you see is emotion, and anger, and fear, and anxiety… and the moment I snapped out of this, she was, in my mind, already killed. And I was so afraid of myself. That’s when I said, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening to me?'”

“I’m so scared of this woman, this five-foot-two woman. I mean, I just, I just didn’t know what to do,” he added as Ferguson confirmed, “You finally snapped, but yeah, I can imagine.”

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Source: HIS Education