Bryan Cranston, the Breaking Bad actor, is retiring to spend time with his wife, Robin Dearden, saying she deserves to be more than his “plus one”.
Cranston, 67, said he and Dearden are planning a move to a small village in France, where they will learn the language and lead a simple life.
“I want to change the paradigm once again. For the last 24 years, Robin has led her life holding onto my tail. She’s been the plus one, she’s been the wife of a celebrity. She’s had to pivot and adjust her life based on mine. She has tremendous benefit from it, but we’re uneven. I want to level that out. She deserves it,” Cranston told the British edition of GQ magazine.
But the actor will not be disappearing from our screens just yet – with several projects in the pipeline – but he has set his retirement for 2026, when he turns 70.
Cranston told the magazine that he will also shut down his production company and sell his half of the drinks company he set up with Breaking Bad co-star Aaron Paul.
Of his imagined new life, the Emmy Award-winning actor said: “I want to have that experience. I want to go for day trips and have [a] fire in the fireplace and drink wine with new friends and not read scripts. It’s not going to be like, ‘Oh, I’ll read and see what I’m going to do’… I’m not going to be taking phone calls.”
Cranston married Dearden, his second wife, in 1989. They met while appearing in an episode of Airwolf, the US television series. Dearden has had a handful of acting roles since, appearing as an extra in an episode of Breaking Bad.
The couple have been going to therapy together since before they were married. Cranston said. “I look at it like this warning light going off on your dashboard. It’s telling you, ‘you might want to pay attention to this’.
“I love my wife and we want to go the distance, but I want to do it in a healthy way. I don’t want to just be with her. I don’t want to just have the two of us go into a restaurant and no one says a word,” he said.
Before his retirement, Cranston has a packed schedule. He will appear in Asteroid City, a new film from Wes Anderson; Argyle, directed by Matthew Vaughn and co-starring Samuel L Jackson; and a reunion project for Malcolm in the Middle, the TV series in which he played the father of a child prodigy.
Bryan Cranston will be speaking at the GQ Heroes conference at Soho Farmhouse, Oxfordshire on Jul 19-21
The post Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston to retire to live in France appeared first on The Telegraph.
