By Michaela Gordoni
Once MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE star Frankie Muniz turned to racing, he happily left Hollywood for calm Arizona.
Muniz has been a professional race car driver since the show ended in 2006.
“I realized I could be based anywhere because no matter what I was on the road,” he told Fox News. “…I say moving to Arizona from Los Angelos saved my life in the sense that I just really started enjoying the little aspects of life. I mean, going to the store, just doing things.”
It was a more relaxed lifestyle compared to LA life, which is “hectic and busy.”
“It wasn’t my cup of tea. I realized I left my house just looking down all the time and when I moved to Arizona, I started looking up,” he explained. “I’ve been there now for 17 years.”
Related: How Frankie Muniz Feels About Juggling MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE Reboot with NASCAR
He felt like he didn’t understand or enjoy life until he moved to Arizona. The star loves it there and doesn’t want to leave.
“Arizona is just beautiful… I love the desert. I love the weather,” the father of one said.
“It was the little things that just became like, oh wait, this is actually what life is,” he said. “This is what life is supposed to be.”
He’s on the road a lot for his profession, but he loves coming back to his Arizona home.
“I’m so lucky taking that step back happened, because it made me appreciate everything more,” Muniz told Us Weekly earlier this year. “It allowed me to do other things and realize a lot more about myself.”
Muniz loves his racing career, but when he left MALCOLM, he was wildly popular and wonders how his life would have changed if he had stayed an actor.
“Like when I had hundreds of offers…I could have kept going non-stop, and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to,’” he said on a podcast earlier this year. “…I look back and I go, ‘Thank goodness I left!’ Because I appreciate life in general more, I’ve started taking more in and I look back at the success I had and go, ‘That was really cool’.”
He’s grateful that he stayed level-headed and didn’t lose his sense of self, like other celebrities do.
“So many people go down a bad path, whether it’s drugs, alcohol – whatever it may be,” he said. “And I think for a lot of people, it’s probably difficult to go from having such success at a young age where you always have people going like, ‘Oh, I love you,’ and everyone wanting you here and there. And then that starts to fade.”
“And I think a lot of people try to replace the missing feeling of [being] wanted with something else,” he said. “And that really is a negative for a lot of people. Whereas for me, I’ve always been super focused on what I was currently doing because I wanted to be the best at whatever I was doing.”
The MALCOLM reboot, MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE: LIFE’S STILL UNFAIR, which Muniz stars in, will premiere on Hulu on Disney+ next year.
Read Next: Why Frankie Muniz Was Ready to Drop Out of MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE Reboot
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