Frankie Muniz has branded the battle to be a child star a “grind”.
The 38-year-old actor found global fame starring in family-friendly hit show ‘Malcolm in the Middle’, but said the fight to find fame involved brutal rounds of auditions and his family making huge sacrifices.
He told the ‘Inside of You’ podcast he has spent the last year also reflecting on the sacrifices his parents and sister made so he could be a child star – with his mother and father divorcing when he aged around 11 or 12, after he started acting at the age of eight.
Frankie said his mum decided to go to New York as “we’d kind of maybe outgrown what we could do in North Carolina, like as an actor”.
He added: “And so that separated my family for the first time. My sister stayed with my dad in North Carolina.
“I went with my mom up to New York and we were going on like six auditions a day and kind of doing the whole grind.
“And I started booking things and never went back to North Carolina… it was kind of this really weird dynamic to look at now.
“It actually makes me a little bit sad to realise that me following my dream and the things that I got to do affected every single member of my family.
“When it's happening you don't realize the sacrifice that every single person is making for you.”
Frankie also told how he was moved by his elderly grandparents being “willing to help out and do whatever they could do” to help him reach his showbiz dreams.
He added: “This year, it was the first time I thought about the past enough to think about the sacrifice that people made.
“And it made me really sad. Like it made happy that I had people in my life like that. But it’s just a crazy thought that without that support, probably none of that happens.”
