Frankie Muniz has shared the memory of meeting his Malcolm in the Middle onscreen father Bryan Cranston for the first time, and it involved a skin-coloured Speedo.
Speaking to PEOPLE ahead of the show’s revival, Muniz, 40, recalled that Cranston was the last cast member to be confirmed, with his role as dad Hal only finalised on the morning of their first shoot together.
“The first scene we filmed is from the pilot where Jane [Kaczmarek], or Lois, is shaving Hal’s back,” Muniz said.
“And he came in, like, a skin-colored Speedo and was like, ‘Hey, boys, I’m going to be your dad.'” He paused before adding: “Obviously pretty awkward.”
Muniz was just 13 at the time, already buzzing from the thrill of landing the lead role.
Meeting the rest of the cast had been exciting enough, but Cranston’s entrance was something else entirely. What nobody could have predicted at that point was how central the character of Hal would become to the show.
“Hal originally was supposed to be such a small character… kind of like an afterthought,” Muniz said. “But Bryan is such an incredible actor and made the show, I think.”
Behind the scenes, the cast quickly settled into something that felt genuinely like a family, pranks included.
They pinned clothespins to each other’s backs, played the circle game with enough force to leave bruises, and fought over a foosball table until the production team replaced it with a ping-pong table.
“That was a bad idea, you couldn’t get us off it to actually film,” Muniz recalled. “We probably could have gone pro.”
Saying goodbye to it all seven years and 151 episodes later hit harder than Muniz had anticipated.
The cast was given about a month’s notice that the show was ending, which he said helped. But nothing fully prepared him for the final day.
“It didn’t have any effect on me like I thought it would until literally the last shot of the last day,” he said. As cameras rolled on the last scene, two or three hundred crew members who had worked on the show over the years had gathered on set.
“I remember starting [to cry] when they started rolling, and it wasn’t for the scene, but it worked really well for the moment. It was really hard to say goodbye.”
The wrap party brought its own quiet emotions. Muniz and Jane Kaczmarek were the last two people to leave the soundstage that night.
“It hit you in that moment of, like, wait, everything I’ve known for most of my life… is ending,” he said.
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
