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Bryan Cranston recalls Malcolm in the Middle blue paint stunt that made his body start to 'shut down'

"And they went 'boom,' and they grabbed me, and they threw me in the shower and…"

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Published on January 27, 2024 03:22PM EST

Bryan Cranston is no stranger to performing out-of-the-box stunts, but he is shedding light on one he did for Malcolm in the Middle that could have killed him.

The actor reflected on his stunt work on the sitcom this week, revealing that his body once began to “shut down” while he was completely covered in paint for a season 2 episode.

"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," he recalled on The Graham Norton Show on Friday. "Completely, head to toe, in blue paint.”

Cranston then referenced the popular, yet untrue, urban legend that Shirley Eaton, who played Jill Masterson in 1964's Goldfinger, died from asphyxiation as a result of going full metallic for the Bond film — Eaton, now 87, is still alive to this day.

“I was gonna say, that’s not safe, Bryan,” Cranston’s Argylle costar Bryce Dallas Howard chimed in from the seat next to him. “That’s not safe.”

“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.”

Howard noted that it would certainly be an inventive way to kill someone.

"To paint them to death?" fellow guest Daniel Kaluuya replied.

“It’s a very slow way to murder someone,” host Graham Norton teased, pretending to paint the air. “Nearly finished!”

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