Bryan Cranston's family used to call him a 'Sneaky Pete'

Growing up, Bryan Cranston's family called him a "Sneaky Pete."

The Breaking Bad actor, who had a challenging childhood, used to find shortcuts to chores and conducted mini-scams -- like reselling used suntan lotion.

That nickname was the jumping point for Cranston's new show of the same name, Sneaky Pete. The Amazon series, which originally was for CBS, was co-created by Cranston and House‘s David Shore. The show, which debuted Friday, follows a recently released con man Marius (played by Giovanni Ribisi), who assumes the identity of his cellmate Pete in order to escape urban kingpin Vince (played by Cranston) to whom he owes $100,000.

“I might be a con man if I wasn’t [an actor],” Cranston told Mashable and other reporters at a recent interview roundtable. “[Sony Pictures Television exec] Zack Van Amber said, ‘What if you were a teenager and you didn’t grow out of it and you’re now in your 30s? What life do you have?’ So that got us thinking about a bad man with a sense of purpose and goodness in his soul that’s undiscovered.”

Cranston's personal stories of being a Sneaky Pete are detailed in his book A Life in Parts, in which he describes growing up with an absent father and an alcoholic mother.

At 13, he said no one was telling him what he couldn't do.

"You’re trying to find your way in and out of situations, and it’s all trial and error. And that’s how you become a ‘Sneaky Pete.'”

For the role, Ribisi said he drew from Cranston, who was a large reason he was attracted to the series.

"It was an opportunity to try and grow and learn and be challenged," he said.

Initially, when the pilot was created for CBS, the show itself was more procedural. However, when Amazon picked it up and showrunner Graham Yost got on board, the tone shifted.

"The idea of the CBS pilot was a procedural that feels still kind of richly peopled with really cool characters," Marin Ireland, who plays Julia (Pete's cousin), said in an interview roundtable. "It was originally going to be me and Giovanni hunting down people or whatever we were going to do. But ultimately, the turnaround to Amazon was really fast."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Yost, who is coming off his FX series Justified, said the new Amazon pilot is about 80% from CBS' version, 5% from the first Amazon pilot (released in August) and 15% new additions added in the re-editing process.

"There was that change of administration," Yost, who worked with Cranston on the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, said during an interview roundtable with Mashable and other outlets.

The showrunner said Amazon allowed him to expand the characters' story arcs, and even add characters to the storyline. Vince, Cranston's character, didn't originally have screen time.

The episodes can also be longer on the streaming service, whereas on CBS they had to be 42 minutes long. Yost said they did make more of an effort to have that cliffhanger at the end of episodes, to make viewers want to continue to binge.

"People often wonder what’s the best way to break a bingeing problem: Stop in the middle of an episode," he said. "Or else if you wait until the end, you’ll let it roll.”