Loyal viewers of Malcolm in the Middle probably remember how they first met Hal, the hapless dad played through seven seasons by Bryan Cranston. In the opening scene of the pilot, he is seen getting his back shaved at the breakfast table by his wife, Lois, played by Jane Kaczmarek.

In January, viewers of AMC’s new Breaking Bad met Cranston, the series star, in a different setting- a remote New Mexico highway- and in an even stranger state of undress; he’s wearing only tighty-whities and a gas mask.

“An acting teacher once said to me, ‘You need to be willing to be naked in front of people, completely vulnerable,” says Cranston, fifty-one, looking distinctly un-Hal-like in a crisp white shirt and natty gray slacks in the living room of his Sherman Oaks, California, home. “He was speaking figuratively, but on Malcolm I took it literally, as well.”

Like Hal, Cranston’s character on Breaking Bad, high-school chemistry teacher Walter White, is a beleaguered suburban dad. But that- and the peek at his less-than-sculpted physique- is where any similarity ends. That’s because Walter, on the heels of his fiftieth birthday, has made the boldest- and by far riskiest- decision of his life.

Spurred by the revelation that the raspy cough he hasn’t been able to shake is actually inoperable lung cancer- and by a chance encounter with a former student who is now a small-time crystal-meth dealer- Walter has morphed from a meek Everymanwho never had so much as a parking ticket into a manufacturer of methamphetamine. His product, in fact, is of such dazzling beauty and purity that he is referred to by discriminating drug insiders as “an artist.”

Walter’s journey to the dark side is motivated by good intentions: to protect his family, he needs to make money fast. HE and his wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), and son, Walter, Jr. (R.J. Mitte), a teen with cerebral palsy, are struggling to make ends meet. Though Walter was at one point a promising scientist who contributed to research that earned a Nobel Prize, he now moonlights at a car wash. Skyler, who is pregnant, brings in extra money selling tchotchkes on eBay, passing them off as folk art.

This means-to-an-end rationalization of the irrational intrigued Vince Gilligan, who created the show- AMC’s first original series since its award-winning period drama Mad Men- and wrote and directed the pilot.

“It wasn’t so much that crystal meth interested me,” says the Virgina-bred Gilligan. “What interested me was the idea of a straight-arrow guy who suddenly just breaks bad, which is an old Southernism- in other words, he suddenly raises hell one day.

“To me, it’s not even a drug show, in a sense; it’s a show about a guy having the world’s worst midlife crisis. A guy who has been a good man and a good provider for his entire life one day finds out he’s dying of cancer and feels robbed. Out of anger and a desire to provide for his family, he does the unthinkable. And for me, cooking crystal meth is the unthinkable.”

Hence the gas mask in the opening sequence, which isn’t just a kooky prop; Walter is wearing it to protect himself from the toxic fumes he unleashed to stave off the two thugs sliding around in the back of the motorhome that he and his partner Jesse (Aaron Paul) have been using as a mobile meth lab.

Barreling through the desolate New Mexico landscape, Walter accidentally rams the RV into some bushes. With sirens wailing in the distance, he puts a hastily misbuttoned green shirt over his undies, grabs a handgun from one of the stiffs and raises the weapon in preparation for a showdown with the authorities he is certain are on their way to apprehend him.

At this point, viewers whose knowledge of Cranston’s resume begins and ends with Malcolm are probably wondering the same thing; How did hapless Hal wind up here?

“Being funny is a separate talent from being a good actor,” says Malcolm creator Linwood Boomer, who is not at all surprised that Cranston is now anchoring a disquieting dramatic piece. “These are people who can be funny, and then there are people who are good actors- and then there are very few people like Bryan who can do both.”

Cranston’s Malcolm costar, Jane Kaczmarek, points out that for all of its silliness, that show delved into emotional material as well. “On occasion we had some very moving, grown-up scenes,” she says. “The second season we did an episode called ‘Flashback,’ where we go back and look at each of the kids being born, and all of the troubles Hal and Lois had. It was one of my favorite episodes because there was some real serious stuff that Bryan and I had to play. He was brave and courageous when it came to the physical comedy, but you knew he had dramatic chops, too.”

Ironically, it was seeing Cranston flourish at comedy that surprised Gilligan. The two men met ten years ago, when Cranston made a guest appearance on The X-Files in an episode Gilligan wrote.

“He had a very big role,” Gilligan recalls. “It was basically just him and David Duchovny in a car for forty-five minutes straight. We had a lot of auditions and saw a lot of good actors, but then Bryan walked in the door and just blew me away.

“I had no idea who he was. As soon as he left I said, ‘Who is that guy?’ My casting person said, ‘He’s Bryan Cranston; he’s been around a long time.’ And I said, ‘Really? This guy is so good, I don’t know why he’s not a TV star.’ I knew from that episode that I wanted to work with him again, so when Breaking Bad came along I was thrilled that he agreed to do it.”

For executives at AMC, who raised no objection to Gilligan’s casting proposal, Cranston struck a tone of vulnerability that was crucial to audience acceptance of what some will surely consider objectionable material.

“Walter White makes choices you’re probably not going to agree with,” says Charlie Collier, the network’s executive vice-president and general manager. “But Bryan plays it so well, and is so likeable, that even though you might not agree, you understand why he might have veered in that direction.”

Before Malcolm became a hit, Cranston had worked steadily for the better part of two decades, but was virtually unknown. Which was fine with him. “Years ago I made the decision that I wanted to be a good working actor,” he says. “If that meant that I would be able to have a nice home, fantastic. If not, I would live in an apartment. But this is what I wanted to do.”

Cranston’s clear-eyed perspective was no doubt shaped by the economic ups and downs he experienced as the son of journeyman actor Joe Cranston, who appeared on several television series in the mid-to-late 1950s.

“I remember one day my dad came home with a brand new car,” Cranston says. “The following year we got rid of that car and got an older one. There was one year I remember we put in a built-in pool, and then the next year I was told we didn’t have enough money to buy chemicals for the pool. But as a kid you don’t have those reference points. I didn’t know what poor was- I mean, we still had food. I got an idea of what poor was when we were foreclosed on and kicked out of our house. That was an indicator. But there’s resilience in children.”

That resilience proved useful when his parents divorced. “The first half of my childhood was great and fun, and there was Little League and all the things that you wanted to do. The second half of my childhood just kind of fell apart.”

He and his older brother Kyle, who lived with their mother following the divorce, might have gone off the rails were it not for their involvement with the Police Explorers, an LAPD community-service type program designed to introduce young people to law enforcement and groom them for eventual police careers. Participation included the study of police science, and when Cranston finished first in his class of 111 cadets, he set his sights on becoming a cop.

Upon graduation from Canoga Park High School he enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College with the intention of transferring to a four-year university after completing his general education courses. Everything was going according to plan until he took an acting class to fulfill an elective requirement.

“It was 1975,” he says. “Hot pants and tube tops were in. And we were in the Valley- it’s hot here. I walked into a stagecraft class and there was a girl who was having trouble making a flat [stage scenery], so I offered to help her. And I thought, ‘Wow the women in theater arts are much prettier than the ones in police science.’ And that’s what changed my mind.

“It may sound horrible to make a lifelong decision based on the hormones of an eighteen-or nineteen-year-old boy, but that’s what happened. Fortunately it was a good move because I really developed a love for acting, I realized later that it was better to choose something you love, and hopefully will get good at, as opposed to something you’re good at, and hopefully will fall in love with.”

That realization was driven home when, after Valley College, he and his brother embarked on a cross-country motorcycle trip that ultimately lasted two years. Cranston recalls the time a thunderstorm hit, and the brothers took refuge at a park- fittingly, in Gilligan’s home state of Virginia. The rain lasted a week, during which Cranston and his brother relied on ramen and reading to keep them going. He still remembers the night he was reading Hedda Gabler in a book of plays he had brought with him, and discovering that several hours had passed without his noticing.

“I was physically trapped, and yet emotionally I was able to soar and dream and go to a place where time seemed to stand still,” he says. “That cognitive moment really informed the rest of my life. At that point, I knew what I wanted to do.”

When he returned to California to devote himself to his new calling, Cranston logged numberous commercials, including spots for Coffee-Mate, Honda and Excedrin, and later moved to New York, where he was a regular on the daytime drama Loving.In addition to The X-Files, he guested on such series as CHiPs, Hill Street Blues,Baywatch, thirtysomething, Matlock and L.A. Law,and was a recurring player on Seinfeld as Tim Whatley, the dentist who is suspected by Jerry and George of converting to Judaism so he can tell Jewish jokes.

Cranston also has a long list of voiceover credits and has had small roles in such feature films as That Thing You Do!, Saving Private Ryan  and Little Miss Sunshine. He is especially proud of his work at Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, produced by Tom Hanks- whose wife, Rita Wilson, is a close friend of Cranston’s wife, Robin Dearden, an actress with whom he has a teenage daughter, Taylor.

At the moment, however, he is fully immersed in Breaking Bad, a richly cinematic production whose cinematographer, John Toll, won back-to-back Oscars for Legends of the Fall and Braveheart, and coexecutive producer, Mark Johnson, earned a best-picture Oscar for Rain Man.

The show got a nine-episode order, but only seven were produced due to the writers’ strike. The planned season finale- with Cranston facing the ravages of the drugs he’s put on the streets- will now carry over to what will surely be season two.

“We would be irresponsible as storytellers if we didn’t address that,” Cranston says. “And we want to do it in a way that- just when Walt starts to feel better, has money in his pocket or the first time and is sort of on a high- that’s when he should realize and see the horrible effects of what he’s responsible for. But right now, he wants to be, and feels he deserves to be, at least in the beginning, selfish.”

Selfish is not a word that many would apply to Cranston, who for all his success counts himself lucky to have remained steadily employed for more than twenty-five years. And he is still game to audition for just about anything.

“I think actors ge in trouble if they develop a sense of enticement,” he says. “And I don’t think we have any right to be entitled to anything. We are the luckiest people in the world. If you’re able to be in our industry and lead a creative life, that’s fantastic. But in no way, shape or form should you feel that anything is owed to you at all. You have to earn everything you get.”

To Vince Gilligan, this combination of humility and talent sets Cranston apart. “I always say that if Bryan were the world’s biggest ass, he would still be worth working with, because he is that good,” Gilligan says. “I watch dailies and just shake my head and marvel. So even if he were the biggest jackass ever, I would still jump at the chance to work with him. But fortunately, on top of being terrific at what he does, he’s one of the greatest guys I’ve ever met.”