Zac Efron can’t seem to shake his High School Musical pedigree — but he’s trying.
His first feature outside the franchise, last spring’s delightful 17 Again, opened with the young star on the basketball court, brow furrowed just like his Disney trilogy counterpart.
And in his latest, Me and Orson Welles, Efron — still paying a high-schooler — wheedles his way into Orson Welles’ 1937 production of Julius Caesar by showing off his singing chops.
Luckily, that’s about where the similarities end. Efron’s character in his new film is set for a much more mature coming-of-age experience, thrusting him into a love triangle with Welles (Christian McKay) and a comely older woman (Claire Danes). But it was the intense backstage world of theater that attracted Efron.
“Essentially what my character does in the movie is everything I did in five years, only he did it in one week and was much cooler,” Efron explains.
“When you’re doing a play, in my experience, there’s so much going on and there’s so much pressure and such teamwork and such camaraderie, you almost gain this whole other family,” he says.
Linklater, who had only seen Efron in Hairspray, admits that he didn’t initially think the young actor would work for the part.
“Frankly, my first impression was that he’s almost too good looking,” Linklater says. “But in my experience, you can’t judge the full range of an actor based on what you’ve seen them in, so we set up a meeting. A minute or two into the conversation, I knew he would be perfect.”
The show-within-a-show aspect of Me and Orson Welles offered Efron the opportunity to expand his experience with Shakespeare, something he didn’t necessarily think he needed to do going into it, he admits.
“I found out I didn’t know the first thing about Shakespeare,” he says.
