Interview

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Unless you’ve got children of a certain age, you probably haven’t seen much of Zac Efron’s work. This is it, so far, in a nutshell: Efron is the star of Disney’s High School Musical franchise, which ostensibly revolves around the blooming relationship between Troy (Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens), a jock and a brain respectively, who couldn’t be more different from each other but who discover a common ground in their mutual love for music. Their (chaste) courtship involves various plot twists and adolescent entanglements enacted through a series of song-and-dance numbers. That, essentially, is a High School Musical movie. In the past three years, Disney has produced a trio of them, and it’s now estimated that the films, plus all of the attendant HSM (as the kids like to call it) merchandising, has generated more than $1 billion in revenues. It hasn’t hurt the cause that Efron got together with Hudgens in real life, and that he also appeared in Adam Shankman’s 2007 remake of Hairspray, which raked in more than $200 million worldwide.

If you’re over the age of 12 and still have all your faculties intact, or if you’re simply a hardened preteen, then the HSM films may present themselves as the worst kind of teenage wish-fulfillment fantasy. They’re simple, sort of saccharine, and seem to exist in a kind of vacuum-packed, irony-free, alterna-reality that makes Saved by the Bell look almost dystopic. But throughout all the songs and dances and platonic romances, two things have become abundantly clear: 1) that the kids don’t care and love the movies anyhow; and 2) that Zac Efron is a star.

Efron radiates a sort of well-scrubbed young mannishness. He’s an entertainer in the most traditional sense of the word: He knows how to carry a tune and turn a step, he winks at the girls and nods at the guys, and he generally appears to be working hard not to disappoint—all of which would seem too good to be true if he didn’t seem to mean it so much. It’s no wonder that his bronzed image—those Hollywood-soulful eyes peering out from under a thick drape of artfully tousled hair—is tacked up in so many lockers, wallpapered on so many iPhones, and emblazoned on so many notebooks and backpacks.

Of course, it’s an interesting time for teen stars. There are more of them now than there have ever been, all vying as desperately for money and attention as they are to ward off the ravages of oily skin. In this air-tight job market, there’s even work for former teen stars (VH1’s Confessions of a Teen Idol) and long-forgotten ones who are addicted to drugs (VH1’s Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew), and there are entire networks with programming schedules built around the conceit that watching people who’ve previously experienced even the faintest whiff of adolescent fame attempting to reclaim their former glory can make for good TV (VH1). But in 2009, the blind glitz of teen idolhood can no longer hide what everyone knows: There comes a time when every teen star needs to do something radical in order to ensure his or her survival, to find some way of making a fast break out of the corner of the moment, to take a perimeter shot at immortality.

Now, Efron is preparing to take his own shot. He’s appearing in his first two post-HSM films, one of which partly takes place in a high school (and in which he, interestingly enough, plays basketball), but neither of which are musical. In director Burr Steers’s 17 Again, Efron stars as a dejected 37-year-old man (played in his older incarnation by Matthew Perry) who is in the throes of a divorce from his high school sweetheart (Leslie Mann), and who, through some mystical transformation not involving the rejuvenating talents of Dr. Fredric Brandt (see page 60), becomes, as the title would imply, 17 again. Efron also stars in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, a period piece set in 1937 about a teenager who is cast in a fraught production of Julius Caesar put on by Welles and John Houseman’s famed Mercury Theatre company.

As hard as it might be to believe, Efron wasn’t born into performing. In fact, he only started doing musical theater and going out on auditions when he was in middle school in his hometown of Arroyo Grande, California. He landed the lead in High School Musical during one of those auditions, the summer before his senior year. We asked director Gus Van Sant to interview the 21-year-old actor. He graciously obliged.