We meet at Austin’s oldest hotel, the Driskill, where the bar is dimly lit and richly appointed in what might be called cattle-baron chic: leather club chairs, cowhide throws, mounted old-timey revolvers. There’s Skynyrd on the stereo; beer and bourbon and fried appetizers on the menu; and enough ambient testosterone in the room to lower anyone’s voice an octave. It’s the kind of place a canny publicist would choose for a client still en route from teen idol to credible adult actor.
Efron’s big breakthrough was, of course, as Troy Bolton in the Disney three-part High School Musical series, which began in 2006 and ended with the actor’s mug gracing heart-shape lockets, Christmas ornaments, laundry hampers. The role was a fruit smoothie of gym-class dance routines, puppy-love duets, and self-affirmation anthems—all of which Efron nailed with Disney-star precision, plus a charisma that is entirely his own. He was pure potential wrapped up in made-to-order tween-crush packaging: long lashes, pointed chin, and a bearing that was reassuringly nonlibidinous. Hollywood took notice, as did every girl on the planet. On two occasions, there were dolls manufactured in his image. Efron made an excellent doll. So good, in fact, that it’s taken six years of movies—the romance, the controversial indie, the period piece, all concerted attempts to throw typecasters off course—to pop him out of that box.
Today he shows up punctually, wearing a denim button-down and white Vans, smiling big and offering a firm handshake and a "Nice to meet you, dude." His 25-year-old face is carpeted in three-day stubble that makes it possible to divine exactly the pattern in which his facial hair grows: heavy mustache, light chin scruff, goofy soul patch. (You're welcome.) The eyes, by the way, are intense, if not entirely heart-stopping—later, Miles Teller, his costar in the upcoming Are We Officially Dating?, will explain that a bit of cinema magic plays its part there: "With the right lighting, that movie star thing happens. It’s like a falling star just happened in his eyes."
The sunny guy sipping Chimay in Austin is a far cry from the intense, stormy character Efron plays in this month's indie At Any Price. Dean Whipple is a corn-fed Iowa race-car junkie who balks at taking on the family farming business when his father (Dennis Quaid) gets in trouble for bending the rules of a high-stakes agriculture industry. Dean rebels in the traditional ways: by casually mishandling a gun, dating a girl who wears shirts that reveal her bra, brooding to rock music in the barn, and having sex with Heather Graham in a grain silo. It’s not necessarily a transformative role, but the movie is beautifully shot, and Efron makes a sympathetic black sheep. After the Venice Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter deemed it an "engrossingly serious-minded heartland drama," with Efron "simmering with the frustrations of small-town entrapment."
"When we first met, he understood the character," said the movie’s director, Ramin Bahrani. "He comes from a small town—Steinbeck territory—so he knew about the pressures of that world."
Efron’s Steinbeck territory is Arroyo Grande, a tiny town in Southern California where, as he puts it, "my neighbor had cows in his backyard.” Efron’s parents, David and Starla, an electrical engineer and a former secretary, respectively, supported their son's acting exploits from an early age, driving him to auditions in L.A. and applauding his community theater productions. And there's still a healthy dose of Arroyo Grande in his mannerisms, speech, and sun-streaked hair: Efron "vibes" with people, uses "rock star" as an adjective, and, when asked about working with Nicole Kidman (in The Paperboy), unfurls a stream of accolades about her acting chops that ends in a pause, a shake of the head, and "She was hot, dude. It was…distracting."
No doubt the feeling was mutual. Heather Graham watched hordes of women line up for a glimpse of him on the set of At Any Price. "On the day we shot the scene at the racetrack, there were countless fans in the stands, and after working a 12-hour day, he stayed to take pictures with every single fan who wanted one," she says. "He must have taken over a hundred photos. I’ve never seen any actor do that."
Now, Efron is in the somewhat awkward position of being a famous and admired young actor who has never made a great movie. Instead, he's acted in a couple of successful—and widely beloved—ones (Hairspray, 17 Again) and been the best thing in some mediocre ones (New Year’s Eve), as well as the saving grace in a few god-awful ones (Charlie St. Cloud). The New York Times called The Paperboy a "hot mess" but noted that Efron’s scenes glinted amid the muck. Another critic wrote that Efron "almost saved" New Year’s Eve. Still, if survival in Hollywood is as much a numbers game as a measure of talent, how has Efron managed to stay afloat without a true big-screen hit under his belt?
Part of that is owing to his knack for attracting great directors—Richard Linklater, Lee Daniels—even if he has, unluckily, appeared in some of their rare flops. As raw material, he's a director's dream: versatile, industrious, and virtuosic in the ancillary showbiz talents of singing and dancing. When Bahrani called up Linklater to ask about working with him on Me and Orson Welles, "Linklater was like, 'Get him immediately,’ " Bahrani recalls. " 'He delivers. He’s superhardworking.' "
Burr Steers was the first director to prove that the cable-TV cutie could carry a movie, casting him as a grown man in the body of a teen dream in 2009’s 17 Again. For a scene in which Efron spins a basketball on practically every finger of his hand—while ably outwitting the high school bully—Steers remembers the actor practicing "until his fingers were raw. Even the basketball wizards who were on set to train him couldn't believe that he could do that all day. He's really, really driven."
But as Tom Carson wrote recently in The New Republic, "nothing makes skill harder to judge than beauty" when it comes to movies. A viewer's first impression of Efron is always based on his looks. His acting may be good, but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s a hard place to be for someone whose sole obsession is, well, acting. Efron is well aware that history doesn’t bode well for the pretty young idol. For every Brad Pitt, there are a dozen Luke Perrys, Andrew Keegans, Joey Lawrences. Efron’s seriousness—as well as his taste in roles—is a hedge against repeating that pattern. "I don’t think he’d be fulfilled taking the safe career route," says Steers. “The old sports aphorism that the key to upping your game is playing with great players certainly holds true in acting. It can be incredibly intimidating, though, because you know that on occasion you’re going to get absolutely schooled. He’s taking that risk. He’s pushing himself because he’s driven to be as good as he knows he can be—which is pretty damn good."
Indeed, if there’s anything to be learned from chatting with Efron at a bar, it’s that he is disciplined in the slightly isolating manner of any monomaniac: He has no girlfriend, few outside hobbies, and little interest in talking about subjects other than work.Acting is his life.
If that sounds off-putting, it’s not—it’s just an unexpectedly adult quality to find in a 25-year-old. Efron lacks the oversharing gene exhibited by much of his generation; the actor he admires most in Hollywood is Leonardo DiCaprio, who brokered the leap from Growing Pains to J. Edgar (and Jay Gatsby) by, as Efron puts it, "saying less and doing more." So while Efron says he can pinpoint the exact year when he considered himself fully mature—"I’ve thought of myself as a man since I turned 23, when there was a decisive life change for me"—he won’t specify exactly why. We’re left to draw our own conclusions: It’s the same year that he and longtime sweetheart Vanessa Hudgens broke up. When the subject of his love life comes up—even obliquely—he acts like an office manager forced to fire a loyal employee: miserable, dutiful, but willfully gracious. It’s not that he dislikes doing interviews, Efron says, but that "we’re at an impasse before we even show up. Fame is inherently uncomfortable. But I want it to be fun. It’s just something that you have to navigate carefully. There’s a way to do it with grace."
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