Bryan Cranston already won a Tony for his work portraying President Lyndon Baines Johnson on Broadway.
He goes a step further in the film version of “All the Way” (HBO, 8 p.m.), making its debut tonight, by seemingly becoming the Texan thrust into the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
There’s no doubt he’ll add another Emmy for the work he brings in recreating the garrulous, uncompromising but often quite insecure president. But it’s amazing the transformation a lot of extensive makeup achieves into making him a spitting image.
“We decided to go full on,” Cranston told reporters at the TV Critics Association press tour earlier this year. “ Fortunately, my own natural physical makeup is what every man searches for — beady eyes and thin lips — and that’s what I share with LBJ.”
While on Broadway, he did his own makeup, putting on those distinctive ears, slicking back his hair and putting some grey in it.
“It became sort of a Zen experience for me as I’m preparing for that performance each night,” he said. “I came to really enjoy that moment of taking him on; and pictures of him around my dressing room, both here doing this film and also on Broadway just it’s almost like you’re just checking in with the character, just seeking approval of some sort of going, Am I doing you justice? Because I think that’s what we feel most definitively is a sense of responsibility to the history and the essence of those characters.”
For the film, which also features Melissa Leo as Lady Bird Johnson, Anthony Mackie as Martin Luther King and Bradley Whitford as Hubert Humphrey, Cranston said it took much more time.
“It was about two hours and 15 minutes every day to get into the makeup. Bill Corso, who designed it and created the makeup, is a genius and a lovely man to work with,” Cranston said. “And also we had lifts in my shoes and little pieces to pull my ears out a little bit and ear drop.”
The makeup and prosthetics affected the performance, but to the better, said the man who had already successfully transformed previously in his career from comic dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” to chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer in “Braking Bad.”
“You start to feel more confident in this guise,” Cranston said, “and then start to ad lib and joke around in character. And that helps me stay in the character as well throughout the more logistical issues of making a movie and moving from scene to scene.”
The depiction of LBJ’s shepherding the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, which Robert Schenkkan adapted from his own play, is directed by Jay Roach, an HBO mainstay who previously directed “Game Change” and “Recount.”
It comes shortly after another remarkable HBO film recounting recent history, “Confirmation,” that will likely be a chief rival come Emmy time.