Actor Bryan Cranston will vote for Hillary Clinton next November, but he would rather play Dr. Ben Carson on the silver screen.
In an interview with Politico’s Mike Allen, the Breaking Bad and Trumbo star had nothing but praise for the neurosurgeon and current Republican presidential candidate.
“I really like Ben Carson,” Cranston said. “He is so calm and in control.”
Despite his affinity for Carson, Cranston, who reportedly had lunch at the White House on Monday, has said that he will support Clinton in her bid for the White House, and recently compared the congressional Benghazi committee’s investigation of the candidate to the “witch hunt” that dogged the character he plays in his latest film, the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
“That was a witch hunt. In fact, a lot of the members of Congress came out and said exactly that: ‘We’re trying to hurt Hillary Clinton’s numbers. We’re trying to subdue her notoriety and try to hurt her reputation,'” the actor recently told the New York Daily News.
However, Cranston told Allen that even though he’s supporting Clinton’s bid for the presidency, he wishes she would move “more to the center, or even to the right” on the country’s fiscal issues.
“I’m a social liberal but a fiscal conservative,” Cranston said. “I don’t run my house that way. I don’t buy things I can’t pay for.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Playboy published Tuesday, Cranston added that he wouldn’t rule out a run for office himself some day:
I’m a closeted politician in my heart. I would love to be involved in politics, just for the altruistic feeling of making people’s lives better. I know realistically that it’s never that easy. Politics is about compromise and bureaucracy, and it’s kind of sticky and murky. It’s no longer about “I’m going to devote four years to my country or my municipality and then go back to being a farmer.” Now it’s a career. People’s egos are wrapped up in it, and there’s a tremendous amount of money involved. It’s hard to sustain the purity of the concept.
The actor described his political ideology as “pure libertarian,” and said he would legalize marijuana and prostitution: “As long as you’re not hurting anybody, you should be left alone.”
Cranston also weighed in on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, telling Playboy that underneath Trump’s “veneer of protection there’s a volcano of complicated emotions.”
“What a man. The things he says; ‘I love women. Look at my wife. She’s hot. She’s super hot. And I imagine some Mexican women are pretty too. Some of them. When they’re not being criminals,'” Cranston said, adding: “It’s just insane! The way he brags about being rich. Why would he do that? Why would he tell the world how much money he has? What is he lacking?”