Bryan Cranston says he was once wanted for the murder of a chef

Bryan Cranston casually recounted the time he was briefly a murder suspect during his appearance on Jesse Tyler Ferguson. Dinner's On Me podcast.

Cranston was prompted to share the story — which he previously wrote about in his 2016 memoir — after Ferguson noted that recent guest Ed O'Neill revealed that he was once approached about joining the mob while growing up in Youngstown, Ohio. “I used to be wanted for murder,” Cranston said, “take that, Ed O'Neill!”

As Cranston explained, he and his brother spent the mid-'70s traveling the country on motorcycles (as one did). When they arrived in Daytona, Florida, they got jobs as waiters at a restaurant overseen by a “bad chef named Peter Wong, who just hated everybody,” Cranston said. “There was no way on Earth you could get on his good side.”

But Wong had a weakness (as men often do): “He liked the ladies.”

Anyway, during pre-service meetings, Cranston said the waiter often complained about Wong and thought of hypothetical ways to get rid of him. “Some would say, 'I think I'd use his own wok on him,' 'I'd put him in the meat grinder' — we'd laugh at all of that,” Cranston recalled. And as Ferguson commented, there are “a million ways to kill someone in a kitchen.”

While none of these plans ever came to fruition, Wong disappeared—and his disappearance coincided with the Cranstons' departure on the next leg of their journey.

“What had happened was that 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. Go to the dog track, “Let me bet on this and bet on that.” And somebody said, “Ah-ha!” And a young lady in a honey trap said, “You're cute, come with me.” And he said, 'Okay'.”

Wong was apparently taken somewhere where he was beaten over the head and robbed and then put in the trunk of a car. Before finding the culprits, the police questioned the restaurant staff and asked if anyone had ever spoken ill of Wong. While the staff continued to “joke” about Wong's offer, they acknowledged that there were two people who had been in on the joke but were apparently no longer around: The Cranston brothers.

“We didn't know they put out an APB to find us,” Cranston said. “We were somewhere in the Carolinas, I think, at that point. We were just getting ready, I can just imagine if someone actually pulled us up and down on the ground with guns blazing! But before that happened, they picked up the pieces and realized they had witnesses and cameras at the dog run, saw what was going on and made an arrest. But we were so close!”