The connection to Co. Armagh is four generations back, but the great Bryan Cranston, star of Breaking Bad, the new Showtime series Your Honor and so many other things, can’t wait to bask in his Irish roots.

Cranston was a guest on last week’s Late Late Show on RTE, and he told host Ryan Tubridy – via video link, of course – that he’s itching for an Irish return.

"I’ve got to come back to Ireland. I haven’t been in several years and I’ve never been to where my people come from in Armagh and I’ve got to go up there,” he said.

"I know when I watched the play The Ferryman in London, I thought that’s where my people are from so I have to go and see what that was like and I can’t wait.”

Cranston added, "My great, great, great, great grandparents came from Armagh so I’m just itching to go there and just soak up the energy and meet the people and be in the culture and get some sense of where my roots started."

Cranston was last in Ireland in 2013, and enjoyed a memorable occasion at O’Connell’s pub in Doolin, Co. Clare, he told Joe.ie a few years back.

“We were advised to go there, we went there on a Sunday. I kid you not, after I ordered Guinness and had a little stew, my wife says within 20 minutes there was a child, a baby on my lap, and I was just bouncing with it on my lap, his father was playing the skins in the band,” Cranston remembered.

“I went okay, and the mother is looking over and is like, okay. It was so trusting and so familial, an experience we don’t have in the states very much. It was an emotional experience to me.”