Bryan Cranston Filmed A Life-Threatening Stunt Nearly Gone Wrong In… ‘Malcolm In The Middle?’

Bryan Cranston spent years filming in the New Mexico desert as meth kingpin Walter White in Breaking Bad. However, his most dangerous acting moment occurred in the family-friendly sitcom, Malcolm in the Middle.

While promoting Argylle with an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Cranston revealed that a scene involving his bumbling dad, Hal, almost took him out of the game.

“One time, I did a thing where my character was in a depression, and he started painting, and I was completely covered in blue paint,” Cranston said. “Completely, head to toe, in blue paint.”

Now, if you know anything about paint and/or how the human body works, then you know where this story is headed. In fact, Cranston’s Argylle co-star Bryce Dallas Howard quickly noted, “That’s not safe,” and she was very right.

Via Entertainment Weekly:

“It’s not safe,” Cranston agreed, “because your body can’t regulate the heat if you’re covering up all your pores.”

Things then took a dangerous turn during filming. “As you shoot, you’re moving around, and then there was a part of me, at one point, I was like starting to shut down the circuits,” Cranston explained, miming being woozy. “And they went boom, and they grabbed me, and they threw me in the shower and they just… It was weird.”

Fortunately, Cranston survived the ordeal, but it is pretty funny that his most dangerous job to date was playing a sitcom dad on Fox. It just goes to show that parenting can kill you dead even if you’re just pretending.

Argylle opens in theaters on February 2.