Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair star Frankie Muniz has set the record straight on the details of his bad memory, after previously suggesting he couldn’t remember shooting much of the original Malcolm in the Middle.
Some important context, in case you don’t remember: Muniz mentioned during his 2017 run on Dancing With the Stars that he doesn’t recall a lot of his time shooting the beloved family sitcom, even noting that he has had several transient ischemic attacks, also known as mini strokes, and concussions over the years that may have contributed to his overall memory loss.
It appears that fans took those comments to mean that Muniz was suffering from long-standing health issues, but the actor now says that’s not the case. “The story of that was taken out of context,” the actor explained to Michael Rosenbaum on a recent episode of his Inside of You podcast. “I have no memory issues, I have a bad memory. All these crazy stories have come out where people are like, ‘You don’t even know your [own] wife.’ I just have a bad memory.”
Muniz noted that work tasks like memorizing lines are no issue for him, but when it comes to his day-to-day, he doesn’t “absorb many things,” and that seems to have included his time on set from 2000 to 2006.
“Since I was eight years old, I have been nonstop doing things — flying here, doing that and just crazy cool things,” the actor turned race car driver said. “I’ve also been an actor my whole life where every single day I’m pretending to be somebody else and having somebody else’s emotions and somebody’s happiness or somebody’s sadness… And they say ‘cut’ when you’re done with the scene and you forget about it. You never think about it again.”
In fact, Muniz thinks that his life as a child star is partially to blame, due to how much compartmentalizing he has done to navigate hectic environments. “I’m so used to going, ‘Oh, I’m done with that.’ And I move on so that I don’t even take it in,” he explained. “Even my real life. Even my real emotions.”
That said, Malcolm in the Middle started over 25 years ago, so naturally some memories are going to fall by the wayside — and Muniz wasn’t the only offender there. “Right before we started filming the reboot, they had all the cast sit on the couch and they put on old snippets and they wanted us to bring up, ‘Oh, remember when we filmed that,’” Muniz revealed on the podcast. “Brian, Jane, all of us were like, ‘We did that?!’ Everybody was like, ‘No way!'”
“I do think I have a bad memory, but it’s not like I have amnesia,” Muniz concluded, before noting, “I have had nine concussions. That doesn’t help. But, you know.”
The upcoming four-part Malcolm in the Middle reboot series will be available to stream on Hulu and Hulu for Disney+ on April 10.
Lex Briscuso is film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.