Zac Attack
The king of tween proves that he has staying power.
To
begin to understand Zac Efron’s particular strain of viral fame, it
helps to stop by your nearest department store, drugstore, or grocery
store.
A quick glance will reveal his omnipresence. He’s on gift wrap and
party cups and trading cards and lunch boxes. That’s his face inside a
pink, heart-shaped locket. On pajamas and night lights, cake
decorations and lip balm, backpacks and umbrellas. He’s on the official
High School Musical digital camera and the official HSM MP3 player. Lately he’s been leaping for joy alongside his cast mates on Honeycomb cereal boxes to plug the DVD release of High School Musical 2.
That sequel, which aired last summer on the Disney Channel, was the
most-watched show in basic-cable history. The original installment—also
a made-for-TV movie—set the stage for HSM mania; since its
debut on January 20, 2006, it has been seen by a worldwide audience of
approximately 200 million. The market-research company Soleil-Media
Metrics recently estimated that the HSM franchise has contributed at least $1 billion in profits to the Disney empire.
Although there are technically six leads in High School Musical,
Efron, 20, is the breakout star, and the cast member who’s become a
prime target for the paparazzi. He alludes to this while we’re cruising
around his L.A. neighborhood in his black Audi S6, driving past his
bland, ordinary-looking apartment complex. “It annoys my neighbors that
the paparazzi take all the parking spots,” he says.
Fortunately, though, they don’t seem to be following their prey to
the safe haven that’s been designated for our interview: God’s house.
The location Efron suggested—the Presbyterian Church of Hollywood—made
me wonder initially if the biggest young star in America, whose
extracurricular résumé so far remains unbesmirched by coke binges,
nightclub brawls, and DUIs, wanted to talk about . . . his faith? Maybe
Zac Efron had found Jesus?
Actually, no. (I find out later he was raised as an agnostic.) Efron
chose this location because the church campus is being rented out by
the production company for his next movie, Seventeen, for the indoor basketball court in particular; Efron’s character in the movie (like his HSM character) is a basketball whiz.
The church setting suits him. He says stuff like “Cool, dude!” with
such infectious joie de vivre that I have to keep reminding myself that
we’re really in Hollywood, the world’s most cynical company town. The
squeaky-clean High School Musical movies were shot in Utah, and
it’s almost like Efron brings a little bit of Utah with him wherever he
goes (he’s actually from Arroyo Grande, California: population 16,700).
He could be a lost Osmond.
On the Hollywood Presbyterian court, Efron
shows off his rapid-fire between-the-legs dribble, explaining that
getting the look and feel of it right took him forever: “I’ve just been
doing this over and over and over again at home, practicing in my
kitchen.” At five feet ten, he’s gifted with speed and agility, but his
teenage growth spurt came relatively late, so for much of his childhood
he was the runty, relatively unathletic kid.
Seventeen is a reverse-Big tale in which a man, played
by 38-year-old Matthew Perry, somehow ends up in the body of a
17-year-old boy, played by Efron. “I’m essentially playing an old, kind
of depressed middle-aged man,” Efron says. He still seems a bit shocked
that the movie was created as a star vehicle for him.
“It’s weird,” he says, “but I don’t feel like I deserve any of the
attention. There’s really nothing but one audition for a Disney Channel
movie that separates me from 2,000 other brown-haired, blue-eyed guys
in L.A., you know?”
Somewhere in the world, right this second, a little gay boy is
making a plastic Zac Efron kiss another plastic Zac Efron. Bizarrely,
the actor’s two biggest roles so far have both led to the same
non-biodegradable immortality. The High School Musical “Troy Bolton” doll version of Zac Efron was followed by its own doppelgänger: the Hairspray “Link Larkin” doll version of Zac Efron.
“Zac is by far the biggest male personality in terms of driving
interest and sales since Leonardo DiCaprio 10 years ago,” says Matthew
Rettenmund, the editor-in-chief of Popstar!, a celebrity teen-pop magazine.
Both DiCaprio and Efron made their names with family-friendly TV (DiCaprio did 22 episodes of Growing Pains; Efron did 16 of the WB surf drama Summerland). DiCaprio had his iconic music-video-esque romantic role (in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet); Efron has his (HSM). DiCaprio broke out of the tween ghetto with Titanic; Efron broke out, to a lesser but still remarkable extent, with last year’s Hairspray (which has grossed close to $200 million worldwide).
Unlike DiCaprio, though, who at the height of his post-Titanic
fame was notorious for gallivanting around with his “pussy posse” of
bad boys, Efron remains, unwaveringly, Mr. Clean. Since much of the
adult audience that knows him by name hasn’t necessarily seen any of
his work, his fame can seem two-dimensional: He’s the smiley,
androgynous pretty boy in all those High School Musical promo shots, looking so innocent and sun-kissed you could almost mistake him for an animated Disney character.
Which is why the paparazzi have, actually, been accidentally helpful. If there’s one reason Efron has graduated from Popstar! pinup to mass-market cultural phenomenon, it’s surely the shots of him canoodling with his High School Musical
costar Vanessa Hudgens during a Hawaiian getaway last year. Those
pictures, he says, were a rather startling wake-up call. Though he’d
previously been “papped,” mostly at official HSM and Hairspray
events, the “Zanessa” pictures were stealthily shot on a beach via
telephoto lens. “At that point it was inconceivable,” he says. “I had
no idea that anyone could ever care. That happens to, like, big stars.
I woke up and my dad told me that I was in a newspaper on the beach—he
made fun of me, he said I was ‘frollicking.’”
Beyond stoking interest in his
on-screen/off-screen romance, the shots had the net effect of
transforming Efron’s image overnight—because they called attention to
the fact that, out of his candy-colored HSM Garanimals, Efron has a body that’s only a few crunches short of a Fight Club–ready Brad Pitt. Suddenly, the world knew that the kid from High School Musical
was an adult. The episode also ended up being his first lesson in the
economics of the stalkerazzi racket. Before leaving Hawaii, Efron says,
“the photographer left me a note with a disc of all the pictures, and
on the note it said, ‘Thanks for the Range Rover!’”
When Kenny Ortega, the director of High School Musical, talks
about Zac Efron, he sounds like he’s discussing a contract player from
the golden age of movie-musicals. “He’ll sweat for hours in the mirror
in prep for a dance number,” Ortega says, “then stay up all night to
record a song.” Both HSM movies—which are jammed with virtually nonstop song-and-dance numbers—were notorious for their grueling, Chorus Line-style auditions and rehearsals.
Of course, the same cultural forces that have made PG-rated TV shows like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance pop-cultural touchstones laid the groundwork for HSM’s
success. In other words, there’s something both profoundly retro and
perfectly timed about Efron and his anti-bad-boy persona.
“I have to say this,” says Efron’s close friend and Hairspray costar Nikki Blonsky when asked for a Zac Efron story. “He and I were both so excited about John Travolta being in Hairspray
with us. We knew that he was coming on a specific day, and the night
before, me and Zac ran to a Subway, got sandwiches, and ran back to his
apartment to watch Grease. We were just freaking out and screaming that we couldn’t believe that Danny Zuko was going to be in our movie!”
Efron is unapologetic about his gotta-sing-gotta-dance! passion.
After getting cast, at 11, as a newsboy in a local production of Gypsy, he discovered his taste for musical theater.
“I wouldn’t say I got flak about it,” he says, “but I wouldn’t say I
got support either.” Efron is telling me this in an off-the-beaten-path
Hollywood coffee shop, which he’s possibly selected because it’s
tween-free. “My friends—it was all about skateboarding, sports. It was
kind of like, ‘Really? Like, really, you have fun acting? Dancing and singing? You really have fun doing that?’”
Unlike some past Disney stars—including Justin Timberlake, Britney
Spears, and Christina Aguilera, who were preteen costars on the Disney
Channel’s Mickey Mouse Club in the early nineties, not to
mention Lindsay Lohan, who had a three-picture Disney deal by the age
of 12—Efron wasn’t concocted in a petri dish in an underground Magic
Kingdom laboratory. He only started auditioning in Hollywood on the
recommendation of a high-school drama teacher, who hooked him up with
her agent.
His skeptical parents (his dad is an engineer
at a power plant, his mom was a secretary there) gave him a year to
make a go of auditioning in Hollywood. This involved a six-hour
round-trip drive every time he got a call to read for a part. As he
reached the end of his allotted year, he started to consider studying
film at either UCLA or USC, where he’d been accepted. “And then,” he
says, “there was one last small audition, for this little TV movie on
Disney Channel . . .”
If Zac Efron sounds like Ren McCormack, the small-town boy in Footloose
who just wants to dance, it’s probably no surprise that Kenny Ortega
has been developing a remake of the hit eighties movie—with Efron, of
course, as the new Kevin Bacon.
In real life, as in Footloose!, there are dark, cynical
forces that conspire to prevent young men from just livin’ their
dreams. Young men like Efron, and dark, cynical forces like, of course,
the paparazzi—a scourge I ask about again despite Efron’s insistence
that he doesn’t want to sound “ungrateful” for his fame.
With a bit of prodding, he finally lets loose on how the paparazzi
get under his skin: “They use espionage tactics, and they’re malicious
and relentless. Anything to get a reaction. Anything to get that frown,
or a scream into the camera, or some kind of backlash. They’ve got that
photo where all of a sudden, you know, Zac’s frowning—now he’s on
crack! They shout things about your mom, about your family. It’s a
weird industry that I’m still getting used to. But sometimes it just
takes all your might not to literally swing at these guys.” Efron knows
the game he’s being asked to play. “These days,” he says, “everyone is
just waiting for me to fuck up. I’m not gonna give anyone the
satisfaction of that.”
Almost immediately, though, he’s back on message as the gracious,
appreciative, levelheaded teen idol: “I actually just got a really cool
letter in the mail,” Efron says. “This girl sent a letter and a $10
bill. It’s a short letter—all she said was ‘Hey, since it’s harder for
you to get out these days to eat without getting photographed, here’s
$10 for a pizza. It’s on me.’ So I was like, Awww! She sent me money
for a pizza, so I could eat in at home!”
Even when I bring up notorious “Queen of Mean” gossip blogger Perez
Hilton, who is obsessed with insinuating that Efron—whom he’s nicknamed
“Zacquisha”—is gay, Efron’s response is almost surreally nice: “I know
it’s very addictive to read that kind of stuff. It’s entertainment.
Perez has obviously struck a chord in the public eye. He’s doing
something right. That deserves admiration—I think he does a great job.
Um—” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “Honestly, if the worst he can
say about me is that I’m gay, then I think I’ll be fine. I can handle
it.”
Has he met Perez? “No, I haven’t yet. But I look forward to it,” he says, laughing. “I think it’ll be a fun conversation.”
Efron’s soft-and-cuddly nice-guy veneer, it turns out, may actually be bulletproof armor.
