Frankie Muniz: Actor, driver, drummer, accountant?

Muniz struggled to describe the band’s sound, but he made it clear that You Hang Up wasn’t just another celebrity vanity project. “The problem with being an actor who’s now in a band is that so many actors have bands and they suck,” he said.

Muniz, on the other hand, is actually a very committed musician — a fact his bandmates were surprised to discover when they invited him to come by and play with them for fun. Muniz, however, had other plans. “I didn’t want to have a jam session. I wanted to be in the band,” he said.

He won his bandmates over, but still had to work on their audience. “There’s a lot more pressure for us because a lot of people expect us to fail,” he said. The day after Muniz mentioned he’d joined the band on his Twitter page, You Hang Up was featured in Rolling Stone. They spent the next few months preparing and building their repertoire so that when the time came to perform, they were ready. “A lot of people come to our concerts and go, ‘Oh, I didn’t expect that,’ ” Muniz said.

This isn’t the first time the former actor has tried his hand at a major career switch. In 2008, Muniz became a professional racecar driver. Though he described racing as “really cool,” the pressure of performing for a team and risking his life every time he took to the track made it a very serious job. Muniz broke 18 bones in his professional racing career, even suffering one injury that left his thumb dangling by a thread. It has since been pinned back in place, but the damage inspired him to take on a new — and safer — career.

Though driving and drumming don’t seem to have that much in common, Muniz explained that both revolve around teamwork. With racing, although he was the person in the car, there were always a lot of people behind the scenes. You Hang Up is a new kind of team effort. Lead singer Aaron Brown comes up with the songs, but everyone writes their own parts and shapes the sound together. Unlike the other band members, Muniz has never been in a band before, but he still can offer them insight on life in the entertainment business and dealing with people who might try to take advantage of young, enthusiastic artists. “They give me advice and I give them advice,” he said. “It works well.”

Overall, Muniz managed to avoid many of the traditional child star woes, in part because he got out of Hollywood as soon as he could. “ ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ ended and I drove to Phoenix the next day,” he explained. He chose the Arizona city because it was “away from everything but still had everything.”

As a child star, he kept a hectic schedule that involved waking up at 4 a.m. to do radio interviews for the east coast, then rushing to work to do more interviews from his dressing room and squeezing schoolwork into 20-minute intervals.

Since his move, he’s been able to settle into more of the traditional, low-key lifestyle he missed as a child in Hollywood. Though he keeps a busy schedule, he’s occasionally able to squeeze in daytime television — including the unavoidable “Malcolm in the Middle” reruns. “I never watched it when I was on it, but ‘Malcolm’ is on 14 times a day in Phoenix,” Muniz said.

He noted that he doesn’t have many regrets about his early work, though there is one thing he would change: “When I first started, basically every episode, they had me running around in my tightie-whities. I might change that,” he said with a laugh.

Though Muniz has no immediate plans to return to acting, he did note that the live theater experience offers the same kind of thrill that playing the drums in concert can. “I like the immediate feedback,” he said, “When you do a show, you’re shooting it out of order and you don’t really hear what people think about it. Or if you do, it’s nine months later. With music you can feel the audience’s energy.”

Still, he said he is considering stepping back in front of the camera again, though he plans to take the darker indie film route rather than go back to something like “Malcolm.”

And if all else fails, he’s got even another career option left. “I’m honest when I say I want to be an accountant,” Muniz added.

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For now, though, he’s happy to be a drummer, and most concert-goers are happy to have him as one. Though he’s heard his fair share of “Go back to ‘the Middle,’ ” he said he’s excited that people are starting to recognize him as Frankie instead of Malcolm.

“Once the novelty wears off, people are going to have to stick with the band because of the band,” he said. “I was at a Paramore concert and the local paper credited me as ‘Frankie Muniz of You Hang Up,’ and I think that was the first time I wasn’t ‘Malcolm in the Middle’s Frankie Muniz. That was exciting.”