Frankie Muniz has denied rumours that he can’t remember filming the TV series that made his name Malcolm in the Middle. Something of a modern-day urban legend, it has been reported that Muniz suffers from amnesia – believed to be caused by multiple concussions or multiple “mini-strokes” – and struggles to remember the majority of his time on Malcolm in the Middle.
Muniz, however, has denied this while appearing on a guest on the Wild Ride! with Steve-O podcast, claiming that the media exaggerated his memory problems. “This is the first time that I’ve actually ever gotten to clarify [the rumour],” he explained. “If you search my name, all it talks about is how like I have no memory or I’m dying of strokes and all this kind of stuff.
“You search my name (and) it’s basically, ‘Frankie is dying’,” he continued. “I’ve thought about it a lot like over my years of like, you know, why do I have a bad memory? [Do] you know what I mean? The only logical thing I can say is, yeah, I’ve had nine concussions. I don’t want to blame the concussions or blame anything else. I just think it’s the fact that I did so f*cking much in that time frame that, of course, I can’t remember all of it.”
He finished by explaining where the rumours came from, and it basically boils down to Dancing With the Stars misinterpreting what he meant when he said he couldn’t remember 2001.
“I love ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ and I don’t want to say anything that will make them hate me, but they kind of tell you what your most memorable year is going to be,” he said. “You know what I mean? And they were like, ‘It’s 2001 because it’s when you were nominated for an Emmy and the Golden Globes’ and all that kind of stuff. And I go, ‘I don’t remember what I felt then. I don’t, you know? It was me, kind of, blowing off the fact that I can’t say ‘That’s my favourite year’ because I can’t tell you what happened in 2001… I had to say, like, ‘I don’t really remember.’ But I wasn’t saying I don’t remember anything.”
What Muniz meant by this was that while people might presume he remembers the year Malcolm in the Middle took off, he doesn’t recall the detail. It’s unsurprising he was only a kid when he filmed Malcolm and was being asked (in 2017) to remember what he was doing 16 years earlier. I couldn’t tell you what I was doing last week, never mind more than a decade ago.
As for the rumours of mini-strokes and concussions? The concussion thing is true, but the mini-strokes were misdiagnosed migraine auras. Good to hear Muniz’s reported health problems aren’t as severe as alleged.