Bryan Cranston: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

4. Shannon - Drive (2011)

Though Nicolas Winding Refn's hyper-stylised genre pastiche belongs to Ryan Gosling for his near silent, mythology-building performance as the unnamed central character, the film would not have worked without the balance afforded by the larger, more colourful members of the cast. Gosling's understated, bristling cool would not be the same without Carrie Mulligan's fierce emotion, or Oscar Isaac's catastrophic volatility, nor would he work as a character without the dynamic he creates with Ron Perlman's almost pantomime-like enforcer, or Albert Brooks' skin-crawlingly affecting king pin, because a largely empty vessel needs something to reflect. Even with that cast of characters, the Driver would still have remained a somewhat impenetrable presence if not for Bryan Cranston's humanising, grounding Shannon - the closest thing the Driver has to a father-figure. In Cranston's hands, Shannon perfectly expresses his unsuitability to the more cut-throat criminal world of Brooks' Jewish mobster, and ultimately his death is the emotional epi-centre of the film, which is played and performed wonderfully and subtly, in contrast to the grotesque, cartoonish violence that marks other deaths (because they simply don't matter as much.)