‘This kid’s gonna grow up to be Brad Pitt’: How Zac Efron escaped High School Musical and became a great actor

It’s a poignant moment in a movie full of them: Kevin Von Erich, a man with more muscles than The Incredible Hulk’s Lou Ferrigno, brushes away a tear. “You shouldn’t see me like this. A man doesn’t cry,” he mutters to his two young kids. The scene comes at the end of The Iron Claw (out this week), and most viewers will feel a big lump in their throat at this point. The character we’ve been watching over the last two hours has suffered so much that we can’t help but root for him. A professional wrestler, he has been battered and bruised inside the ring – and has experienced extreme pain and bereavement outside it too.

The actor playing Kevin with such dignity and pathos is Zac Efron, former Disney teen star. Not so long ago, Efron was being dismissed by critics as a lightweight. “A young fellow of such flawless matinee-idol good looks that he could well have been manufactured in a plastics factory,” was how Time Out’s reviewer summed him up, when Efron played Troy Bolton in the three High School Musical films. Rolling Stone complained that the High School Musical franchise was “not even bubblegum enough to be enjoyable on an ironic level” and “plain vanilla, no sprinkles” – and Troy was at the heart of it all.

Efron was the king of bland, ersatz middle-American teen pop culture. He played basketball. He sang lullabies and danced. His relationship on screen and off with co-star Vanessa Hudgens delighted the teen fans. They were part of a new generation of wholesome young stars such as the Jonas brothers and Miley Cyrus, who also appeared in Disney Channel shows. But within two decades, the squeaky clean teen heart-throb has turned into a broodingly intense Method actor.

What’s most impressive about Efron in The Iron Claw (written and directed by Sean Durkin) is his understatement. His Kevin is a taciturn figure who doesn’t know how to talk to girls (Lily James’s Pam has to ask him out because he’s too tongue-tied), and who keeps his face partly hidden beneath a mop of hair. Caught between domineering ex-wrestler dad Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) and ultra-religious mom Doris (Maura Tierney), Kevin is only truly happy when he’s with his beloved younger brothers Kerry, David and Mike (played by Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons).

Based on the true story of a celebrated Texan wrestling family, The Iron Claw is a sports drama that veers off in the direction of Greek tragedy as misfortune after misfortune threatens to flatten the hapless Kevin and his brothers. The film isn’t the first time Efron, now 36, has bulked up (he also had a Charles Atlas-like physique as the bodyguard in the 2017 movie version of Baywatch). Nor is this his darkest role – that would be serial killer Ted Bundy in Joe Berlinger’s biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile in 2019. For that project, Berlinger took a big chance on casting Efron as Bundy.

“My now 25-year-old daughter was a massive Zac fan when she was a pre-teen and teen, so we watched High School Musical at home more times than I want to admit,” Berlinger confesses to The Independent. “I wanted this audience to be a mirror to Liz [Bundy’s longtime live-in girlfriend played by Lily Collins] who believed Bundy was innocent and was not capable of these crimes because he was charming and good-looking and seemingly so trustworthy… This movie was targeted at my daughter’s generation – young twentysomethings who barely knew the Bundy story. They all love and revere Zac and feel they know him.”

Berlinger remembers the “crowds of young women” who would gather around the set, simply trying to catch a glimpse of Efron. The director was accused of “Disney-star stunt casting” but insists that was “the opposite of the truth”.

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The young actor was perfect for the role, and the film marked a watershed in Efron’s career. Once he had played Bundy, it was obvious that he could take on any kind of project. The role was the culmination of a long process of reinvention. Efron had clearly yearned for years to escape being typecast as the clean-cut all-American hero. When the High School Musical films were still being made, he was already restless, the one member of the cast who refused to go on tour, performing the songs live. “If I had to hear the High School Musical songs anymore, I probably would have jumped off something very high,” he told journalist Neil Strauss in an interview when he was 19.

Born in October 1987, Efron had been brought up in a middle-class Californian family. As Rolling Stone magazine later reported, his piano teacher Jeremy Mann encouraged him when he was 11 to audition for a stage production of the musical Gypsy. He won a role and that was when he “became hooked on acting.”

“I said to myself, ‘This kid’s gonna grow up to be Brad Pitt.’ He’s probably the most charis­matic little kid I’ve ever met,” Mann later recalled.

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As the High School Musical hysteria grew, Efron tried to be strategic in his career choices. He kept the Disney bosses happy, remained respectful to his fans, and generally avoided the kind of tabloid scandals that had dogged stars such as Lindsay Lohan. At the same time, he was always on the lookout for challenging material. He starred in Richard Linklater’s commercially unsuccessful 2009 period drama Me and Orson Welles, playing a teenage theatre lover who somehow talks himself into a role in Welles’s landmark New York stage production of Julius Caesar.

“He’s a natural song and dance man, really gifted, a total leading man,” Linklater enthused, praising Efron for going “toe to toe” with Christian McKay’s overbearing Orson Welles without “crumbling and disappearing” in the great man’s presence.

Arguably, Efron’s early years were never as clean-cut as the Disney Channel stable suggested. As he told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2014 interview, he had struggled with alcohol and drug problems, and had been to rehab.

By then, he had already started to appear in offbeat projects, such as Lee Daniels’ 2012 crime drama The Paperboy. That film is often remembered for a bizarre scene in which Efron reads Lolita and sunbathes next to Nicole Kidman. He goes swimming but is stung by a jellyfish, causing a severe allergic reaction. Kidman saves his life… by peeing on him.

Efron has also long shown an appetite for frat-boy comedies. He is back on screen soon in Peter Farrelly’s male bonding romp Ricky Stanicky, about three pals who hire a down-at-mouth actor and stripper to impersonate their imaginary friend Stanicky, on whom they’ve always pinned their own bad behaviour.

This is just one of several vehicles in which Efron has wilfully subverted the wholesome screen persona of old. He had a wild time in Florida with the ancient but incorrigible Robert De Niro in Dirty Grandpa, and was involved in plenty of Animal House-like high jinks in Bad Neighbours and its equally bawdy and prurient sequel, Sorority Rising.

Now, in The Iron Claw, Durkin pushes the star to new extremes – both emotional and physical. The most brutal wrestling scenes are shot in full frame. When Kevin is slammed into the canvas, it doesn’t look as if that thudding feeling is being achieved by clever editing or special effects. Even more startling is the raw feeling in the story. Kevin has been brought up adhering to a code of extreme machismo – but he’s a delicate soul in a brute’s body.

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Collaborators all attest to Efron’s professionalism and versatility. He can sing, he can dance…and he can play cold-blooded killers too. Berlinger remembers that when he and Efron were preparing the Bundy project, they went to New York to the premiere of big budget musical The Greatest Showman, one of the actor’s most showy and romantic movies. Berlinger was amazed by his range.

“He has amazing instincts, street smarts and, most importantly, incredible emotional intelligence that just burns through the camera,” the director says. In hindsight, it’s no surprise that Efron was able to escape the shackles of High School Musical. But The Iron Claw suggests there’s still so much more to come.

‘The Iron Claw’ is in cinemas now. ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ is available on Prime Video