By Shawn Adler in Los Angeles

The best thing I can say about Frankie Muniz is that my eight year old nephew wants to be him. To be fair, it probably has less to do with the fact that Muniz stars as a pint-sized James Bond in the "Agent Cody Banks" films and more to do with the fact that Muniz got to kiss Hillary Duff, but role models rarely get to be choosers.

Apparently, my nephew is not alone. With his roles as the titular characters in "Malcolm in the Middle," "Big Fat Liar," and "Agent Cody Banks," Muniz is inspiring a whole legion of adolescents in much the same way teens look up to Orlando Bloom. Which is to say with reverence, envy, and a general feeling that he’s a super cool guy.

Muniz gets to once again save the world and win the girl (who for the record is OLDER than me, which is kind of disturbing) in "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London." He recently sat down with Cinema Confidential in Los Angeles to talk cars, scripts, and super spies.

Q: Did you have any special training for this film?

FRANKIE: Yeah, I did the same amount of training [as the first one] for about two months before, about 4 hours a day: 2 hours of lifting, and then 2 hours of martial arts. I wanted to be able to do all of the fight scenes. I did about 90% of all the stunts in the first one, but that 10% is too much for me. I could tell, because I knew what I did do and what I didn’t do. I want to do as much as possible because it makes it more real looking. You can see my face, and that’s so cool, rather than like a wide-shot of the stunt-double doing it and then me [makes goofy “thumbs-up” face.]

Q: How much control do you like to have in your movies?

FRANKIE: I like when everything is set up and I just go in and do it. With this one they [the creators] were calling me a lot and saying “We have this great idea for this-“ And so I would say yes or no to that. Then while we were filming it, Anthony [Anderson] and I would rewrite some of the scenes as we were doing it, because they wanted us to add more comedy. A lot of the fight scenes in this movie I came up with, because I know what I can do. I know what I look best doing. So all that stuff was me, but other than that I just did it.

Q: Now that you’re one of the big screen spies and have your own franchise, who are some of the other franchise spy stars do you admire, and what particularly about them?

FRANKIE: Well, I think everyone’s a fan of James Bond, and I love that Agent Cody Banks is a junior James Bond. Everybody wants to be James Bond, and now kids can have somebody to look up to. I think James Bond is really the greatest.

Q: Do you have a favorite Bond?

FRANKIE: Well, the one that I was old enough to actually understand was “Die Another Day.” The cars at the end were pretty cool.

Q: What’s going to happen to Agent Cody Banks when he graduates high school?

FRANKIE: I don’t know. Maybe that’s what the third one will entail.

Q: Are there plans for a third one?

FRANKIE: Well, we’ve talked about it, but it’s really all if this one does well. Right now, I’m not at the best part of my career to do another Cody Banks movie, three years in a row. Being on "Malcolm in the Middle," I only have three months during the summer to do something else. Now that I’ve turned 18, I have to make that transition from child actor to adult actor, which I thought would just come with me turning 18 and continuing to do what I was doing. But it’s more than that. I have to pick the right roles and work with the right people. More serious roles to become a more respectable actor.

Q: Does that transition scare you at all?

FRANKIE: Well, it doesn’t scare me, but I’m actually thinking about it for the first time which is weird. Like I said, I always thought it would just happen and I’d be set. It’s been hard. I have so many movies lined up for this summer that I could do. It’s tough choosing the right one. It really needs to be something different, but I can’t go totally away from my core audience of 12 to 18. So it’s got to be the right movie that people will look at and not just say, “Oh, that’s him trying to be dramatic. That’s him trying to make the transition.” I need to be very believable.

Q: When you read these scripts what goes on in your mind? How do you evaluate which ones to do?

FRANKIE: Well, before this period it was always what was I going to have the most fun doing? "Cody Banks" was awesome, "Big Fat Liar" was so much fun, you know Malcolm is so much fun, but they’re all kinda the same thing: comedies geared to a younger audience. So I need to make that change. The scripts I’ve been reading have been very different. It’s cool. There’s somethings that I’m afraid of, that kinda scare me a little bit. Everything will work out, I hope. We’ll see what happens.

Q: Are there any directors you’d like to work with?

FRANKIE: There are so many directors I would like to work with. I’d like to work with a huge director like Steven Spielberg or someone like that. I’d like to be on the set for a $200 million movie. What’s the craft services like? That’s all I care about?

Q: What are the differences between the first script that you got and what you wound up shooting?

FRANKIE: Well, the first script we originally had Angie Harman coming back to be my handler and then we kinda lost that because we didn’t want it to be the same person. And then we were going to have the same bad guys back. But then we didn’t want the same bad guy because then it would have to be the same bad guy fight scene at the end. We wanted to make it a different movie. One thing the first movie lacked is more comedy, and we definitely got that by bringing in Anthony Anderson. We probably changed the script about 4,000 times. We were writing it pretty much as we were going along. Luckily everything came together.

Q: Where did the idea to go to London come from? And how did you find London?

FRANKIE: Well, from the first draft London was always in there. Of course, they wanted to film it in Canada somewhere and make it look like London. London definitely made the movie a lot better. It was very different. You know, I thought it was going to be exactly the same. We all speak English. They don’t really shut down the streets when you’re filming. They don’t have extras. They just have people. It was very different but it was cool. That’s something I love about doing movies. You get to live somewhere for three months.

Q: Did people recognize you?

FRANKIE: People recognized me there, but nothing like here of course. I got recognized for Punk’d more than anything else, which is how it is here now too.

Q: What would you do if you had the power to control people’s minds [as in the movie]?

FRANKIE: Well, first I’d make everyone go see this movie. No, I don’t know. Pave the roads in LA so I could drive! I bought my Jeep just so I could drive it and not worry about avoiding every pothole like I do in my other cars.

Q: Have you ever gotten out of a ticket just because of who you are?

FRANKIE: [Looks around] I’ve been pulled over 13 times and I’ve never gotten a ticket. I was pulled over three times in the same day for playing my music too loud. I was driving the car from The Fast and the Furious. Everything you do in that car is illegal. They were going to give me 22 citations at once. I was like, “It’s a movie car.” I was just going to park it in my garage, but the cops went back to their car and came back and were like, “Can we have your autograph? Just go ahead.”

"Agent Cody Banks: Destination London" opens in theaters this Friday