Bryan Cranston Recalls Interaction With Charles Manson

After Charles Manson’s death Sunday, actor Bryan Cranston recalled his run-in with the convicted murderer in 1968. The 61-year-old was 12 at the time.

“Hearing Charles Manson is dead, I shuddered,” Cranston wrote on Twitter. “I was within his grasp just one year before he committed brutal murder in 1969. Luck was with me when a cousin and I went horseback riding at the Span Ranch, and saw the little man with crazy eyes whom the other hippies called Charlie.”

The Breaking Bad actor previously talked about meeting Manson in a July 2016 interview with The Daily Beast.

Cranston grew up in Canoga Park, Los Angeles. At the time of the meeting, he was riding horses at Spahn Ranch. The owner, George Spahn, let the Manson Family live on the ranch for free, in exchange for doing chores and helping run horse rentals.

As he told the Daily Beast, Cranston said he was riding horses with a younger cousin. They were dropped off at the ranch while his mother and uncle were off elsewhere.

“We noticed that the people around there were all strange in their own kind of interesting way,” Cranston recalled. “There was an old guy [Spahn] checking us in and some guy in his twenties came in yelling, ‘Charlie’s on the hill! Charlie’s on the hill!’ Everybody looked around and there was this frantic nervous energy going on, and they all jumped on horses and away they went. We asked the old guy what was going on, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s happened before.’ We thought, well, Charlie must be someone important.”

Twenty minutes after they left the barn, Cranston and his cousin saw a trail of horses returning to the ranch.

“There were about eight or so people, and there was a man in the middle on a horse but he wasn’t holding his own reins – there was someone on the horse in front holding the reins – and Charlie, I guessed, was this comatose, bearded, long-haired guy with big eyes riding as if he’s just stuck to the back of a horse,” Cranston continued. “Totally zoned out. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. My cousin turned back to me and said, ‘Wow, that guy’s weird.’ When we passed him and their whole group, she turned around again and said, ‘That must be Charlie,’ and I said, ‘Yeah… and Charlie’s freaky!’ We didn’t think anything of it.”

A year after the meeting, the Tate murders happened. When Cranston saw Manson on television, he was stunned. He couldn’t believe that the man he saw on the back of a horse was a murderer.

“We thought for a second, oh my god, what if? It was very freaky, to say the least,” Cranston said.

Mason died at age 83 of natural causes in prison. He was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of seven people.