Zac Efron: The New American Heart Throb
This is my favorite place to eat breakfast, because you don’t see the SUV’s with the blacked-out windows here,” Zac Efron says as he sits at a greasy diner in Toluca Lake, California. (The name is Patty’s, but don’t tell the paparazzi.
Efron is wearing mirrored sunglasses and a brown knit hat, which, in the summer sun, is making him sweat. He hasn’t had a decent shower, because the hot water in his nearby two-bedroom apartment was shut off today. “As long as I stay boring, I think I’ll be fine,” he declares.
So that’s your strategy for success? Just stay boring? “Yeah, seriously,” he says. “I’m going to try.”
He picks at his scrambled eggs and brown rice with his fork. “I’ve never done interviews like this before,” he says. “I’m still so new to this, it’s literally a one-in-a-million chance that I’m here.”
Efron is a nineteen-year-old celebrity doing his best to act like a normal nineteen-year-old boy, which, as anyone who reads the tabloids knows, isn’t easy in Hollywood. If you’ve never actually heard of Efron, that’s OK. He’s only the actor, singer, dancer and heartthrob who launched the biggest-selling CD of last year and what may be the most popular made-for-TV movie of all time. Of course, he barely even sang on the album, but we’ll get to that later. That’s all part of why life is a little confusing for Efron right now.
Efron’s current status stems from three words that will haunt him for the rest of his life: High School Musical, the Disney Channel song-and-dance movie about an unlikely love between a school jock (Efron) and a brainiac transfer student (Vanessa Hudgens) who are rumored to be linked in real life –— but more on that later, too. Efron’s aw-shucks charm, crush-worthy good looks and charismatic dance moves were to a large degree responsible for the movie, DVD and soundtrack shattering records. But unlike, say, Ratatouille, High School Musical has no double-entendres, visionary artistry or adult appeal. It is not even bubblegum enough to be enjoyable on an ironic level. It is plain vanilla, no sprinkles; it is the type of hormone-drained, rebellion-free idealized teen fantasy that parents want their kids to see (the lovers in the movie don’t even kiss). And their kids are seeing it —– tens of millions of them.
It is one of the crowning achievements of a powerful new pop-culture demographic that makes the kids who liked Good Charlotte seem elderly in comparison. Empowered by the ability to buy entertainment on the Internet at the press of a button without even understanding what money is, these tweenyboppers are even surpassing hip-hop and rock fans. Just last month, this audience helped the new double album from Miley Cyrus (star of Disney’s Hannah Montana) hit the Number One slot, selling more copies in its first week than debuts from American Idol stars like Kelly Clarkson and Chris Daughtry.
The poster boy of the tweenybopper set is Efron –— one Web site even insists that one of every three teenage girls in America actually has a poster of him. Efron also happens to be Disney’s most reluctant star. Though every breakout star in the cast of High School Musical has signed a solo record contract, he has turned all offers down. Though High School Musical may film dozens of sequels, he said he’d “hopefully not” do many more. And when High School Musical‘s cast went on tour, he was the only one who sat it out.
“If I had to hear the High School Musical songs anymore,” he confesses, “I probably would have jumped off something very tall.”
It’s not that Efron isn’t grateful. He knows that High School Musical transformed him from television-drama walk-in to leading man. That’s why he’s starring in the sure-to-be-a-hit sequel, which premieres on Disney on August 17th, in which the East High kids go to a summer country club and a Disneyfied class war ensues. However, Efron now has the clout to play by his own rules, so he fought Disney – and won – in order to be allowed to sing on the movie and album this time around.
“I didn’t even sing on the first album,” he admits. “It wasn’t my voice in the movie. Even though I wanted to do it.” He pauses to order a vanilla shake, then continues, “So what do you do when the entire cast is supposed to accept an award at the Billboard Awards and your voice is only on the album in a select few lines? I felt extremely guilty.”
Efron’s breeding is evident in everything he says and every decision he makes. It is clear he was well raised. When a group of girls and their mother pester him for an autograph, Efron stands up and walks outside the restaurant to allow them a better photo; afterward, he shakes everyone’s hands and asks for their names. Everywhere he goes, he’s glad-handing and introducing himself – —smiling, humble, obliging, never too busy —– as if he’s running for public office.
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