In “Breaking Bad,” Cranston quietly shifted the arc from good-man-becomes-bad to invisible-man-becomes-vivid. Illustration by Ian Wright

The staggering was all wrong. And the flailing? Unacceptable. Bryan Cranston turned from the video playback with a grin. A few weeks before, he had shot the last episode of “Breaking Bad,” the AMC series that gave him what he calls “the role that will undoubtedly be the first line of my obituary.” Now he was on the set of “Godzilla,” a Warner Bros. remake. In this scene, Cranston, playing the top scientist at a Tokyo nuclear facility, was having an intense argument that’s interrupted by a seismic jolt. Behind him, jumpsuit-wearing extras had begun reeling about as if they were in a cheaply enjoyable fifties version of the story, rather than in the expensively enjoyable version that Warner Bros. hoped to produce. “Doesn’t work, does it?” he said. The director, Gareth Edwards, an Englishman working on his first studio film, gave a rueful nod. “What I tell the background guys when I direct,” Cranston said afterward, referring to the television episodes he’s directed, “is ‘Don’t do it, think it.’ If you just think, This guy’s a douche bag, it will come through your eyes.”

On this June morning, all the elements were in place for a pro-forma blockbuster: a nine-figure budget, the most awesome mutant lizard that computers could generate, and a colossal monument to hubris soon to lie in ruins—the nuclear facility, played by the sludge-control building of a wastewater-treatment plant near Vancouver. The afternoon’s filming would consist of camera-car shots of swarms of extras racing down an endless concrete corridor and Cranston barking into a walkie-talkie as he raced the other way: the Hollywood disaster film in sum.

Yet one reason that the filmmakers cast Cranston, a three-time Emmy winner on “Breaking Bad,” was to distinguish this “Godzilla” from a standard remake. Sue Kroll, the president of worldwide marketing for Warner Bros., says, “When non-fanboys see that Bryan is in it, they’ll hesitate and think, That’s interesting—I wonder what he saw in the role?” The actor has become the studios’ ancho chili, the ingredient that adds distinction to any dish. When Ben Affleck was preparing “Argo,” in 2011, he told his producer, Grant Heslov, that he wanted to hire Cranston. “Yeah, we should,” Heslov replied. “We’re the only movie coming out next year that doesn’t have him in it.”

Cranston serves projects as a one-man truth squad. It begins with his appearance: age has favored him with the craggy, slab-jawed countenance of a religious elder. He smiles a lot—at fifty-seven, he has responded to his late stardom with boyish ardor—but when he smiles “you’re completely confused,” his wife, Robin Dearden, says, “because the smile doesn’t go with that face.”

On “Godzilla,” Cranston radiated vigilance. In one scene, his character, Joe Brody, walks briskly with an administrator named Stan as the two scan a printout of seismic activity. Stan wonders whether it shows earthquakes, but Brody says, “No, no—earthquakes are random and jagged. This is steady and increasing.” Between takes, Cranston tweaked the dichotomy to “random, jagged” and “consistent, increasing” to give it a scientist’s concision and to avoid the paradox of “steady and increasing.” He persuaded Edwards to shoot the moment not as a walk-and-talk and a closeup but in one go. “It’s an affirmation of what Joe already knows,” he pointed out—no spoilers, but the movie is called “Godzilla”—“so he wants to move.” Then he surveyed the extras and murmured, “There’s a guy reading a manual in the background—would that happen?” Noticing that Edwards was beginning to resemble St. Sebastian, Cranston patted his shoulder and said, “Never mind, never mind—I’m picky. We’re good!”

Cranston has time for such troubleshooting because he’s not one of those broody actors who wrap themselves in a Navajo blanket and insist on being addressed only as Mr. Wolverine. He gets into character instantly and can produce wracking sobs on cue (the secret, he learned from a stint in soap operas, is to hydrate days in advance). Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Cranston as a seedy mechanic in “Drive,” says, “Bryan Cranston can play anything, anytime, anywhere, any way.”

On “Action!,” as the next scene began, Cranston instantly became a preoccupied Joe Brody, resisting Stan’s attempts to stifle his concerns and keep the plant operating. But when Cranston was supposed to bark, “I have operational authority,” it came out as “I have control authority.” Without skipping a beat, he continued, “I am the Secret Santa to all these guys!” and everyone cracked up. Cranston—a master of the blown-take button and the vibrator hidden in a co-star’s drawer—uses anarchy strategically, to keep his sets relaxed. The first time he directed an episode of “Breaking Bad,” he arrived wearing a beret and a monocle and carrying a horsewhip. Between takes now, he played the bongos on the crew’s hard hats, duckwalked, dipped into a British chav accent, and recited Samuel L. Jackson’s “motherfuckin’ snakes on this motherfuckin’ plane!” speech, getting Jackson’s indignant cadences just right.

Meanwhile, take by take, Joe Brody shrugged Stan off more and more touchily. Cranston had suggested that Stan drag Joe aside. “In order to stop me, at this point, he’s got to physically stop me,” he explained. “And my reaction—that I wouldn’t feel right about letting him move me like I was a little boy—helps create a history and a mood.” Edwards told me, “There’s a fine line between a great, character-driven movie and a throwaway popcorn flick, and that little scene is one of my favorites, because it helps us harken back to a seventies-movie feel. The layer of history Bryan created—that Joe and Stan are good friends, but their friendship is being severely tested—wasn’t at all on the page.” He laughed. “The problem with Bryan is that he comes with a lot of ideas, and you have to say ‘Damn it,’ and rethink everything, because he’s always right.”

If you’re always right, you may not always be in the right place. In his trailer, Cranston told me that when he trumpeted a few recent offers to his wife the skeptical tilt of her head made him realize that he’d been indiscriminate. He wanted to carve out time to pursue a deal he’d made with Sony Television to produce his own shows, and also wanted to pick roles that forced him to stretch. “You never want to repeat yourself,” he told me. “Otherwise, it’s just”—he named a well-known actor—“doing his thing.” He leaped to his feet, raised an imaginary pistol, and shouted, “Get down! Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!,” followed by “Because right now you’re safest with me!” and “He’s my son!” He shrugged. “You can write the dialogue before you see the film.”

So he’d constructed a grid in blue ballpoint: the Cranston Project Assessment Scale. On the left were rankings from Very Good to Poor, and across the top, in decreasing order of importance, were Story, Script, Role, Director, and Cast. A very good story was worth ten points, a very good cast only two. Story and script count the most, he said, because “an actor can only raise the level of bad writing by a grade. C writing, and I don’t care if you’re Meryl Streep—you can only raise it to a B.” After factoring in bonus points (high salary = +1; significant time away from family = –3), he’d pass on a project that scored less than 16 points, consider one from 16 to 20, accept one from 21 to 25, and accept with alacrity one from 26 to 32. “ ‘Argo’ was a twenty-eight,” he explained, showing his addition. “Ben was a three as a director—he was ‘good’—and now he’s a four, ‘Argo’ says. ‘Godzilla’ was a twenty, on the high end of ‘consider.’ I was dubious, but when I read the script I was surprised—you care about these people, and you’ve got Godzilla.”