‘Breaking Bad’ star in new 1950s Red Scare movie: Unions failed to protect blacklisted actors

Bryan Cranston, the “Breaking Bad” star, plays blacklisted Hollywood director Dalton Trumbo in a new movie.

A Daily Beast interview with Cranston is getting attention for his statement that if he ever gets to meet former Vice President Dick Cheney, he would say “Shame on you.”

But the man who played antihero Walter White thinks labor unions representing actors also deserve shame.

“The primary responsibility for a government is to protect its people — but the same is true for unions, whose number one responsibility is to protect their membership,” he is quoted as saying. “And they failed. The Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, they all turned against their membership.”

Anarchy and fear were rampant in the Red Scare years of the 1940s and 1950s, he said.

“They were the same tactics that were used in Nazi Germany: Are you helping the Jews? Who is helping the Jews? Point them out! It’s Gestapo tactics, and they were used here. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? was an illegal and un-American thing to ask. It’s protected under the First Amendment. It’s no one’s business.”