‘Malcolm In The Middle’ Star Erik Per Sullivan Turned Down ‘Buckets Of Money’ to Return as Dewey in Series Revival, Says Jane Kaczmarek

Money isn’t everything, but it is when you don’t have any.

Quite right. The money lets people do what they want to do. He doesn’t want to do it, more power to him and by the same token Cranston can pick and choose his roles.

Yeah, he must have had parents that were more concerned about his future than theirs, that's not the typical experience for child actors. Good for him

Yeah. The hit rate for "enjoys studying Dickens" vs "turned out to be a massive dickhead who enjoys meth" with child stars is pretty bad. For the ones who have a good support system and good instincts to manage the fame, it can be f****** awesome. Kids only work a few hours a day, get most of the fun of being a star without having to worry about paying the bills, etc. And you can pop out of Hollywood at 18 with literally millions of dollars sitting in a bank account that you can retire off of the day you become an adult if it is well managed so it really may not matter if you aren't super qualified to go into the normal workforce and you can pursue whatever you want. For the other probably 2/3 of kids, it's a nightmare. Stage parent puts a ton of stress on the kid, kid is the family breadwinner so paying the bills is on them. Kids get pushed into material they aren't remotely mature enough to handle, and a bunch of the ones who are good at it have super vivid imaginations so their body feels like they are traumatically _living_ the crazy drama scenes they are stuck in over and over again doing a million takes. You turn 18 and your parents have mismanaged the money. The theoretical custodial account went all-in on crypto scams and NFT's so you are 18, you aren't cute any more, and you are broke, and you never went to real school and you are kinda unqualified for normal jobs. We can all think of a couple of young actors who wound up going down that kind of road. For the ones who "make it out," I think it's super easy to imagine they want some distance from the job they had as a little kid, even if it wasn't like traumatic. Ironically, the ones who had the worst time are probably proportionally more likely to stay in acting because it's the only skill on their resume and they don't have other options. When I was in elementary school, I played baseball. One of those things my parents signed me up for. I wasn't any good at it, but just pretend I was magically a superstar 10 year old baseball player and made money at it. How many of us would really want to be stuck playing in the peewee baseball league that our dad signed us up for when we were 10? At age 25? 35? Forever? Eventually most people would want to move one from what they did in elementary school before they had any real agency.

Are we rooting for everyone to have had a bad time? Like what is this 

Omg dude quit being so whiny. He’s a f****** adult. He’s allowed to say no. It’s a complete sentence. He’s not into acting anymore and doesn’t owe us shit. Get over it and yourself.

It was really more of a lateral move.

The world needs more well-read and educated people, not less