Name: Bryan Cranston Explains What It Takes to Be an Artist | Big Think
Uploaded: 2025-01-01T16:21:54.000Z
Duration: 5 min 6 s
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The comparative

I think, generally, artists are much more inclined to just embrace ambiguity than the business world.

So does art, whereas business lies in facts, lies in specifics.

This equals this, and if you do this, you'll get that.

In art, you have to find your own reward in it.

So it's still a work-reward system, a meritocracy, but the rewards are different.

I try to encourage young actors or writers or directors to go into the arts for the right reason, and that is the love of the art.

And I can always tell when they're not heading in the right direction is when they're looking at something as some sort of stepping stone to something else.

I'm in Los Angeles, which is not a theater town, but you'll hear often actors say, I'm going to do a play so that I get an agent, so that I can get some work in television.

And it's like, oh, brother, if I can give you some advice, don't do the play.

If your goal is to achieve something else other than the experience of telling this story in this play, you're setting yourself up to fail.

I try to discourage as much as encourage young people from entering into the arts because they are in for a lot of tremendous frustration or they will just simply give up when there is resistance or what they perceive to be resistance.

I knew I had this epiphany that I knew I wanted to become an actor, and that meant for me

I'm not going to give it some arbitrary two-year kind of limitation.

And if I don't achieve X by two years, then I'm, or what, I hear this all the time and it's like, what does that mean?

If you're acting, you should do it because you are empowered by the function of acting, of storytelling, writing, directing, even producing.

And you really have to get into it for the right reasons.

I think artists of any kind, dance, painting, sculpture, acting, writing, musicians who are like jazz musicians, they live in ambiguity.

Trust your feelings, trust your instincts, certainly for actors.

If every night on stage is exactly the same, then you're not paying attention.

You're not listening because it cannot possibly be the same.

It could be familiar and similar, but there might be subtle or nuanced changes from night to night different.

And I think we're just more comfortable in ambiguity.

And I think by and large a lot of stories that end ambiguously are more satisfying because they feel more real.

Sometimes art should be kept in the impressionistic realm that it's not so neat and clear and oh, this person ended up with this person and they lived happily ever after.

Maybe we feel at the end of a film or a play this character that I've been following I think now has a chance to find happiness for this.

 So I think it's a great place to live and it thrives and it should be not only supported but nurtured ambiguity in the arts.