Bryan Cranston Reveals He Was Briefly Wanted For Murder

Bryan Cranston is more like Walter White than you think. While appearing on the latest episode of Jesse Taylor Ferguson's Dinner's On Me podcast, the Breaking Bad star revealed that he was once wanted for murder in the '70s. For real. While chatting with the Modern Family alum, Cranston recalled an ill-fated summer in the mid 1970s, when he and his brother were driving across the country on motorcycles. At one point, they ran out of cash in Florida, so they got jobs working in a restaurant called the Hawaiian Inn. Also working there was a cook named Peter Wong, who the whole staff hated dealing with, according to Cranston. "There was just no way on earth you were ever going to get on his good side. But he liked the ladies. And so, all the men knew, oh, if we had any problem in the kitchen, we had to send them in," Cranston shared. He described the cook as "awful" and said the staff would often have meetings where they joked about ways they could get rid of him. "We'd all discuss how rotten and mean Peter Wong is, and we'd all discuss, if one were to do away with Peter Wong ... how would one do it?" he recalled, sharing how some jokingly suggested the use of a "meat grinder" or hitting him over the head with "his own wok." It was all in good fun -- if a bit disturbing -- till Wong was actually murdered. Making matters worse, It all went down just after the Cranston brothers had decided to head "up north" with plans to go "all the way to Maine on our motorcycles." "Little did we know that right at the time we said goodbye and left the job, Peter Wong went missing," Cranston said. "He was not found for a week, week and a half, two weeks." The actor revealed that Wong always carried a "wad of cash" with him and would often go to the dog track. One day, a "young lady in a honey trap" approached him and led him back to "a house or something" where someone knocked him over the head and robbed him. Cranston shared that the robbers later put the cook in the "trunk of a car," prompting a lengthy investigation that led police right to the Hawaiian Inn. "My friends were saying, 'Homicide, what's going on?'" Cranston recalled. "They're saying, uh, 'Peter Wong was found murdered.' And everything just drops because this is serious stuff." "And then they said, 'Is there anyone ever that you can remember talking about hurting or maiming or doing any harm to Peter Wong?' And everyone's like, 'Um, yes,'" before telling police that they all joked about murdering Wong from time to time. "'Well, this is not a joke This really happened and the man's dead. Is there anybody who was joking as you put it, and is not here now?'" Cranston recalled the police asking his former co-workers. "And they were like, 'Well, the Cranston brothers.'" "'When did they leave?' 'Two weeks ago.' 'Two weeks ago? That's when we determined that you know, the man was killed,'" the Malcolm in the Middle alum continued. "'Where can we find them?' They go, 'Well, they left town.' 'Oh, they left town?'" It didn't take long for the Cranston brothers to be pegged as suspects in the murder, with the 67-year-old actor revealing that the police actually put out an APB, or all-points bulletin, for the pair, in order to inform the public that a pair of killers could potentially be on the loose! "Little did we know they put out an APB on us and to find us. We were somewhere in the Carolinas, I think at that point," said the Malcolm in the Middle alum. Lucky for Cranston and his brother, police caught Wong's real killer, and the pair were never actually stopped by police. "We didn't know any of this," Cranston added. "We were just tooling along. I can just imagine if someone really pulled us over... we were this close."