Malcolm in the Middle‘s Frankie Muniz is setting the record straight on claims that he has severe memory issues.
During the Tuesday, April 7, episode of the “Inside of You” podcast, Muniz, 40, corrected host Michael Rosenbaum on the subject, saying, “To bring up the memory thing a little bit — almost to clear the air a little bit — the story of that was taken out of context in a sense.”
Muniz explained that he just has a “bad memory.”
“All these crazy stories have come out where people are like, ‘You don’t even know your [own] wife,’” he noted. “I just have a bad memory.”
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The former child star “can remember lines” but has ultimately figured out that he doesn’t “absorb so many things,” adding, “Since I was 8 years old, I have been nonstop doing things — flying here, doing that and just crazy cool things. 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 or somebody’s anger or someone’s love interest.”
Muniz continued: “They say ‘cut’ when you’re done with the scene and you forget about it. You never think about it again. Then you go on to the next emotion or the next day or the next character. I almost feel like some of it has to do with the fact that like 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.”
The professional race car driver has seen it affect his real life too.
“Even when I do races. This isn’t a memory thing and I’m probably going to make the story about my memory even worse,” he joked. “But I’ll do a race with 300 laps and I’ll listen to other drivers be like, ‘Oh, yeah, on lap 157, we were doing this and we were battling.’ I remember, like, two laps of the race that I did the night before. I’m so focused on what I’m doing.”
After becoming a household name for his role in Malcolm in the Middle, Muniz previously spoke exclusively to Us Weekly about not being able to recall certain moments of the hit sitcom.
“It’s something I’ve never really talked about. But we were talking about being on Malcolm and how it started, and I don’t really have memories of being on the show. My memory of being on the show is seeing the episode and seeing the show. So that’s what we started talking about, and it became the story for the night for me, but it is true. It’s a weird thing. My whole life, it’s not just now,” he shared in 2017, adding that he’s “had a lot of concussions” in his lifetime. “I’ve had nine concussions, which I think if I was a ballplayer, I wouldn’t be allowed to play anymore. But I don’t know. Like I said, it’s not something I’ve looked into … I’m not a doctor person. Every time I go to the doctors, they tell me I’m just crazy.”
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Muniz credited his wife, Paige Price, for helping jog his memory.
“I get sad at the thought of losing my memory, because I know that I do. So [Paige] writes literally in detail — she’s a writer too, so it works — like a journal that I can look at any day. It does bring me back there because there is really cool, amazing detail,” he continued.
Muniz went on to shed more light on his health battle — including how it was misrepresented.
“I did Dancing With the Stars in 2017, and they have an episode where it’s the ‘Most Memorable Year’ episode — they told me my most memorable year was 2001,” he said on the “Pardon My Take” podcast in 2022. “And I go, ‘I don’t know what to say,’ and they’re like, ‘Why?’ … They’re interviewing me and the way it got cut together, the way they put it, was that I have zero memory of anything.”
He added: “Now if you search my name, it basically says I don’t remember anything — like 50 First Dates, my wife has to wake up every morning and play me a video. I know I was Malcolm. I did a lot of stuff. I don’t remember everything. … I like to now talk about it because I have a better understanding of what it is. … People come up to me all the time and they’re like, ‘Do you know who you are? Your name is Frankie Muniz.’”
