Daniel Kyri is looking back at a frightening experience from his time on Kid Nation.
In PEOPLE’s exclusive sneak peek of VICE TV’s Dark Side of Reality TV, the Chicago Fire star, 29, recalls accidentally drinking bleach on the set of the 2007 reality series, which chronicled kids trying to make a functioning society without the guidance of adults in the ghost town of Bonanza City, New Mexico.
When asked about the “infamous” incident, Kyri shares that it happened in the “early morning,” adding, “We’re in charge of the saloon. We’re gonna get in there and we’re gonna start our morning off right.”
“I just grab this sort of faintly yellow liquid. It’s giving citrus. It’s giving lemon, like it’s giving fresh,” he recalls.
However, it turned out to not be the fruity drink that the actor was expecting.
“Unbeknownst to us, the crew would have to sanitize certain areas where we ate and drank, and they put bleach in bottles that looked like soda,” fellow contestant Olivia Cloer claims.
Not realizing what he was drinking, Kyri remembers that he “unhinged my jaw, and it’s like, gulp, it’s gulp, it’s gulp.”
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Almost immediately, Kyri realized something was very wrong, recalling, “And then, a burning and fumes, the fumes that kind of rise up, it chokes off your oxygen so you can’t breathe.”
“Somebody grabs the bottle and she smells it,” he adds. “She’s like, ‘It’s bleach,’ and I just like, take off running to where all the adults are.”
CBS did not immediately return PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Since then, Kyri has moved on from reality TV and is a series regular on Chicago Fire. He has starred as Darren Ritter since the start of the series in 2018.
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The Dark Side of Reality TV’s Kid Nation episode airs Sept. 17 at 9 p.m. ET on VICE TV.
