Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston had been fighting for Malcolm in the Middle to return for years before Hulu finally greenlit its new limited series.
“I planted the seed. I told Linwood Boomer, the creator of the show, that there’s cause to revisit this,” Cranston, 70, told Obsessed: The Podcast of his “unfinished business” on the show that launched his career. “The fans are telling me their ideas of what happened and their questions of what happened, and I couldn’t answer them.”
“There was some resistance at first because we’ve all moved on. But I think once you get a certain distance away, it’s a little easier to turn around, look back, and go, ‘Yeah. You know what? Maybe, maybe, maybe...’” Cranston, who followed his stint as the lovable Hal on Malcolm with Walter White on Breaking Bad, continued.
Now, 20 years after the show ended, its cast is returning for a four-part limited series continuation of their beloved sitcom, Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, on Hulu.
Since the show ended in 2006, its once relatively unknown cast, led by then 13-year-old Frankie Muniz, has gone in entirely different directions. While Cranston went on to become a highly respected dramatic actor of both stage and screen, Muniz has spent much of the past two decades as a professional race car driver with NASCAR.
While the world has changed a great deal, too—Kaczmarek, who plays Malcolm’s mom Lois, quipped that JFK Jr. was still alive when they shot the pilot—the heart of the show remains the same.
Kaczmarek, 70, said that Hal’s love for Lois, despite her tendency to get “big” and “scary,” is “the cornerstone of this whole thing.”
“Their devotion to each other is what keeps this family really going,” Kaczmarek, who was nominated for Emmys in each of the show’s seven seasons, said.
Cranston said the gift of good TV writing is that Hal never has to say outright, “We have a good marriage.”
“It just kind of slides underneath the surface of it. And I think that’s what makes the show work,” he said.
Muniz, who is now the age his onscreen parents were when the show premiered, is thinking of the show in terms of his own parenting style.
“When you look at the relationship that the whole family had, they truly loved each other. And Lois was hard on the boys because she wanted them to be the best that they could possibly be,” Muniz, 40, said. “I find that with me as a father—my son’s five—you’re always constantly questioning if you’re doing it right."
“I don’t know, maybe I need to try some of Lois’ tricks to get him to be a good boy,” he joked.
While Muniz said returning to the Malcolm house was “surreal,” it was Hal’s pilot callback of stripping off his clothes that reunified the cast.
“One thing that Brian has done from show to show to show, he’s always in his tighty whities at some point, it’s his signature,” Muniz added.
“I get naked in everything I do,” Cranston joked. “I don’t know why, but I’ve stopped questioning it and just accepted that’s what the world wants to see.”
Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair will release all four episodes of its limited-series reunion on Hulu on April 10.
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