Frankie Muniz says he briefly quit Malcolm In The Middle

It sounds like Frankie Muniz was caught in the middle of some frustrating on-set drama while filming his iconic family sitcom, Malcolm In The Middle. “There were two episodes I’m not in. I walked off the set,” Muniz revealed on a recent episode of Australian reality series I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (via The Independent), which is, coincidentally, almost exactly what he apparently said while filming his sitcom in the early 2000s.

According to Muniz, who would have been between 15 and 21 years old at the time of the incident, the behavior of “certain people” prompted him to leave. He didn’t reveal who those “certain people” (plural!) actually were and it seems unlikely that he will in the future, but for the record, his co-stars for the majority of the show were Bryan Cranston, Justin Berfield, Erik Per Sullivan, Jane Kaczmarek, and Christopher Masterson.

“Everyone was so afraid to stand up when certain people were controlling or rude or disrespectful. Like they walked on pins and needles,” he continued. “I was so mortified by seeing people afraid to stand up for themselves, I was like: ‘Say something.’ I didn’t care if they told me I was never going back, because it was worth it to me. It helped that the show was based around me.”

Luckily, it sounds like the child actor had some real bargaining power on set—you can’t have Malcolm In The Middle without Malcolm after all. Muniz claims he was absent from two episodes of the show as a result of his walkout, but he didn’t specify which ones. While The Independent does assert that there is footage of Muniz in every single one of the show’s 151 installments, he’s only seen in archival shots in the season four episode “Clip Show #2,” and cold opens or other footage could have been shuffled around to bridge the gap.

Speaking to news.com.au, Muniz also revealed that he “never felt like I fully fit in the Hollywood world, even though I was in the world. I was nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes, and I was going to all this stuff, and I was there, and I was like, how am I here?” In 2008, Muniz put his career on hold indefinitely to become an open-wheel race car driver, which sounds no less terrifying, but is perhaps a walk in the park for someone brave enough to stand up for himself at such a young age.