Cameron Monaghan is best known for his appearances on Shameless and Gotham, but his breakout role came much earlier in his career playing Chad on Malcolm In The Middle. Cameron Monaghan was just 17 years old when he started playing Ian Gallagher on Showtime’s long-running comedy-drama Shameless. His nuanced performance as the gay bipolar son of dysfunctional patriarch Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy) earned Monaghan plenty of critical acclaim and a nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series at the 2015 Critics’ Choice Television Awards.
Monaghan juggled playing Ian Gallagher on Shameless with another TV role on Fox’s DC Comics-inspired series Gotham. Well, technically it was two roles as Monaghan first appeared as the Joker-esque anarchist cult leader Jerome Valeska. Later, after Jerome was killed off, Monaghan stayed in the Gotham cast playing the role of his even more evil twin Jeremiah, which won him Choice TV Villain at the 2019 Teen Choice Awards.
Though Shameless and Gotham helped put Cameron Monaghan on the map, neither Ian Gallagher nor the Valeska twins were his breakout role. Monaghan has been acting since before he hit double figures, making his debut in family film The Wishing Stone and TV movie musical The Music Man, all before his tenth birthday. His first big role, however, came playing Dewey’s classmate Chad in the fifth and sixth seasons of Fox’s acclaimed sitcom Malcolm In The Middle.
Cameron Monaghan’s first Malcolm In The Middle appearance was season 5 episode “Dewey’s Special Class” in which Dewey lands himself in a remedial class for emotionally disturbed kids known as the Buseys, one of which is Monaghan’s character Chad. Obsessive sorting, wearing oven mitts and believing he could make people spontaneously combust just by looking at them were among Chad’s many quirks, and a running gag saw him constantly sporting signs taped to his t-shirt featuring hilarious handwritten warnings like “do not corner” and “seizures may be a trap.”
Although Cameron Monaghan only appeared in a total of six Malcolm In The Middle episodes his hilarious delivery of lines like “Mom’s right: I do have crazy eyes” made Chad a memorable character and marked Monaghan as a young actor that was going places. Monaghan’s Malcolm In The Middle performance also saw him win his first award – Best Recurring Young Actor in a TV Series – at the 2005 Young Artist Awards which, funnily enough, were hosted by his future Shameless co-star Emmy Rossum.