Bryan Cranston casually recounted the time he was briefly a suspect in a murder case during his appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast.
Cranston was prompted to share the tale — which he previously wrote about in his 2016 memoir — after Ferguson noted that recent guest Ed O’Neill revealed he’d once been approached to join the mob while growing up in Youngstown, Ohio. “I was wanted for murder once,” Cranston quipped, “take that, Ed O’Neill!”
As Cranston explained, he and his brother spent the mid-Seventies traveling the country on motorcycles (as one did). By the time they got to Daytona, Florida, they were broke, so they picked up jobs as servers at a restaurant overseen by a “cantankerous chef named Peter Wong, who just hated everyone,” Cranston said. “There was just no way on Earth you were ever going to get on his good side.”
But Wong did have one weakness (as men often do): “He liked the ladies.”
Anyway, during pre-service meetings, Cranston said the waitstaff frequently complained about Wong and pondered hypothetical ways to get rid of him. “Some would say, ‘I think I would use his own wok on him,’ ‘I’d put him in the meat grinder’ — we’d laugh about all of these,” Cranston recalled. And as Ferguson astutely noted, there’s a “million ways to kill someone in a kitchen.”
While none of these plans ever came to fruition, Wong did go missing — and his disappearance happened to coincide with the Cranstons’ departure on the next leg of their trip.
“What had happened was he was an insecure guy, and what do insecure guys do? They like to feel big,” Cranston said. “So he always carried a wad of cash. He’d go to the dog track, ‘Let me bet on this, and bet on this.’ And someone went, ‘A-ha!’ And a young lady in a honey trap said, ‘You’re cute, come on with me.’ And he said, ‘Ok.’”
Wong was apparently then taken somewhere where he was knocked over the head and robbed and then stuffed in the trunk of a car. Before the culprits were found, the cops questioned the restaurant staff and asked if anyone had ever talked about harming Wong. While the staff copped to “joking” about offing Wong, they acknowledged there were two people who’d participated in the joking but were conspicuously no longer around: The Cranston brothers.
“Little did we know they put out an APB on us to find us,” Cranston said. “We were somewhere in the Carolinas, I think, at that point. We were just tooling along, I can just imagine, if someone really pulled us over and down on the ground with guns blazing! But before that came to happen, they put together the pieces and realized that they had witnesses and cameras at the dog track, saw what was going on, and made an arrest. But we were this close!”
