Last Friday we got to see Zac Efron on the cover of the new issue of Interview magazine but, at the time, no other photos nor the interview was available online. Today, we get to check out a few photos from Zac’s Interview photospread along with a portion of his interview with famed director Gus Vant Sant:
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.
And then Gus and Zac get to talkin’:
GUS VAN SANT: Sorry we couldn’t do this in person.
ZAC EFRON: It’s all good. Where are you right now?
VAN SANT: I’m in Gearhart, Oregon. It’s on the coast outside of Portland. I’m in a beach house.
EFRON: I’ve been to the coast outside of Portland—a couple of times, actually. I might have been where you’re at. I have relatives up there. I think I took a road trip from Portland one time with my aunt, because she lives there. It’s a beautiful place.
VAN SANT: It’s really beautiful here today.
EFRON: It’s pouring in L.A. [laughs]
VAN SANT: So when was the last time that you were in Oregon?
EFRON: Oh, man. It seems like it’s been years. We used to go up there all the time, but I’m stuck in L.A. a lot now.
VAN SANT: Is your schedule today really tight?
EFRON: Not today. I’m not really doing anything. I’m looking at some furniture, because I just got a new place, so I’m figuring out if I want this desk. I’m sitting at it right now. It’s a vintage Herman Miller desk from, like, 1940-something. I don’t know . . . I’m just deciding if I’m going to want it in my house, or if I’m just going to completely wreck it. [laughs] Herman Miller’s stuff is really, really modern, but they have some pretty brilliant designs. [Ed note: Herman Miller is credited with inventing the office cubicle.] I’m sitting at this desk, and it’s the most well-built thing I’ve ever sat at . . . It’s a beautiful piece. It’s got this amazing wood grain that I’ve never seen in any piece of furniture. It’s also a little pricey . . .
VAN SANT: Yeah, those kinds of things are superexpensive, right?
EFRON: Superexpensive. I’m lucky they’re letting me test it out at my place for a couple of days before I have to buy it.
VAN SANT: Oh, the desk is at your house?
EFRON: Yeah. It’s at my house. I’m sitting at it right now. I just bought this place. It’s not big or anything, but it’s a pretty unique space. It’s very modern, very clean, very simple. It’s got concrete floors so I can’t screw it up. I can skateboard inside the house . . . You know, all the essentials are there. I just don’t want to buy nice furniture and then fuck it all up.
VAN SANT: Well, you could put a protective writing pad on the desk. [both laugh] So do you actually skateboard in your house?
EFRON: I have, but now there’s too much stuff around, so it’s getting harder.
VAN SANT: Did you take any pictures for this article already?
EFRON: Yeah, we did.
VAN SANT: How did that go?
EFRON: I think it went pretty cool. There was, like, a giant sandbox in the middle of a studio, and then I just got to roll around in the dirt for a couple of hours. I got pretty dirty by the end of it, so that was fun. It was definitely different from anything I had ever done before. The photographer was really fun to work with . . . He recommended some furniture.
VAN SANT: I wanted to ask you about this Richard Linklater film. Is it Orson and Me?
EFRON: Me and Orson Welles.
VAN SANT: Where did you shoot that?
EFRON: Rick was brilliant, because he found this great theater on the Isle of Man, which, after a little bit of work, looked a whole lot like the Mercury Theatre did in 1937. We took a beautiful theater and made it look rusty and old and dusty, and, once we filled it with extras dressed in 1930s attire, the place was very believable. It even smelled like an old theater. It was pretty neat because we were basically stuck there—you know, we couldn’t leave. There was nowhere to go on the Isle of Man. So we lived in that theater for several weeks. It was fun and exciting, but it was also kind of maddening. I went a little bit insane.
VAN SANT: How old is Orson Welles in your movie?
EFRON: He’s in his mid-twenties, but he’s got the wisdom and the presence of a 50-year-old . . . Well, you know, a 30-year-old guy. [laughs]
VAN SANT: A friend of mine was Welles’s chauffer.
EFRON: Oh, really?
VAN SANT: Yeah. Welles was in his sixties, and he was in L.A. This was in the ’70s. My friend would drive him in some giant 1950s car that was painted turquoise. It was a convertible. The top was always down, and Welles would wear a huge 10-gallon hat and ride in the passenger seat, because I think he liked that people would see him and recognize him. There’s still a movie of his that we haven’t seen. I think it’s called The Other Side of the Wind. I hear it has a bunch of people playing Welles. John Huston plays him at an older age. Peter Bogdanovich plays him at a younger age. It’s his last unfinished film. I don’t know where it is, but I haven’t met anyone who has seen it.
EFRON: That’ll be interesting. People always have such a different way of playing him. They tend to go for the Citizen Kane interpretation.
VAN SANT: When is Me and Orson Welles going to come out?
EFRON: I think some time later this year.
VAN SANT: But before that you have 17 Again.
EFRON: Yeah, I’m getting ready for that.
VAN SANT: Your character in the film is 37 years old, and you’re playing him as a 17-year-old. What was it like playing somebody so much older?
EFRON: At the time, it was the most unique opportunity that presented itself. There were several roles that I could have done where I would have played essentially another high school student, or they were romances or stories in a high school setting, and there were lots of things that people wanted to turn into musicals. But the whole idea of playing a 37-year-old guy as a 17-year-old was just the most exciting prospect for me. I was really intrigued by the idea. I’ve always been kind of an old man, so to speak.
VAN SANT: Was there something that you needed to do, some technique, in order to actually pull that off?
EFRON: Well, I couldn’t really relate to the character in a lot of ways, so I didn’t have that to work from. I worked a lot with Burr [Steers], the director, and Matthew [Perry], and just tried to think in terms of an older guy. He’s experienced life. He’s been through a lot that I haven’t been through yet. So it was a big change from High School Musical. You know, I’ve fallen in love, and I’ve not known what I want to do with my own future—I still don’t know. But I’ve never had a daughter who I’m looking out for. I’ve never been proud of my son. I’ve never gotten a divorce. It was interesting trying to figure that out. It was definitely a change of pace. And it was great working with Burr, because he’s got this huge imagination, and this sense of people—not what they seem to be, or what they’re defined to be, or what they want to appear to be, but as they actually are.
The rest of the online version of this interview can be read HERE but the full text of the interview can only be read in the mag. To be honest, I still have a hard time taking Zac Efron serious … at all. He’s deffo no Daniel Radcliffe who, even at his young age, has proven time and time again that he has the acting chops to really be a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood’s future. Zac still strikes me as the overly coiffed prettyboy that will get cast in throwaway movies until he no longer manages to attract his young teenage girl audience. There’s never been a project that Efron has been attached to that I felt compelled to see. Even when he tries to act grown up, I’m not buying it. After the jump, check out one more NSFW photo of Zac from this issue of Interview — he’s posing with a fully nekkid woman lying on top of him …
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