Zac is featured on the cover of Variety with a great photoshoot and interview!

When Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler” came out in 2008, Zac Efron was two movies deep into the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical” franchise, in which he played singing, dancing basketball phenom Troy Bolton. He’d been the swoony romantic lead in the movie musical “Hairspray,” opposite John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer, was shortly to play opposite Matthew Perry in “17 Again,” and had pulled his T-shirt up on the cover of Rolling Stone under the headline “The New American Heartthrob.” At 21, Efron might have seemed like the kind of actor who was as likely to watch footage of the moon landing and decide to become an astronaut as he was to take inspiration from Mickey Rourke’s grizzled, broken-down performance.

And yet. “That film impacted me in a really specific way,” he recalls over lunch in Los Angeles. “I was watching it with my dad, and I remember looking at him in that moment, saying, ‘That’s what I want to do. That’s where my heart is.

It was easier for Efron to imagine himself there than for his parents — an electrical engineer and an administrative assistant comfortably raising the new American heartthrob — to understand his passion. “It’s got to be weird,” Efron goes on, “watching your child go through the more challenging route. I know that at times they had to be thinking, ‘He shouldn’t even do this stuff.’”

Efron had, to that point, made it through the maelstrom of Disney stardom, maintaining an image of squeaky-clean ambition even as his peers, from Shia LaBeouf to Lindsay Lohan, stumbled in the glare of a hot spotlight. Lanky and laconic, Efron was, above all, low-key — so much so that the tabloid coverage, inevitable for a star of his magnitude, focused primarily on his relationship with “High School Musical” co-star Vanessa Hudgens. (The pair confirmed their breakup in 2010.) The pressures of Hollywood took their toll eventually — Efron entered rehab for substance abuse in 2013, at age 25 — but his early days are remembered first for Troy Bolton, a tweenage dream of the ultimate nice guy.

The challenging journey Efron has taken to escape that character and image has lasted 15 years. That time has held a fair amount of movies, and a fair amount of living — but he got there. In “The Iron Claw,” the new film by Sean Durkin, Efron delivers a performance whose ambition will surprise you. It’s a movie-star turn as a character whose tragedy is that he can’t use charisma to bypass his problems. Durkin compares Efron to Robert De Niro in “The Deer Hunter,” calling him a “quiet leader”; and to Burt Lancaster in “The Swimmer,” “because he’s in a Speedo the whole time.”

He’s kidding, kind of — but Efron’s physicality is central to this work. With his hair cut into a Prince Valiant bowl cut, Efron has transformed himself into a Marvel-esque specimen. He’s playing Kevin Von Erich, a pro wrestler living through the deaths of each of his brothers in sequence. The real-life Von Erich was one of a family of grapplers on the 1980s circuit who were stalked by a series of fatal mishaps; on-screen, their father, played by Holt McCallany, forces them forward with a grim refusal to acknowledge their feelings, even as they mourn brother after brother. Men, they’re told, don’t cry — and so all of those feelings are converted into athleticism, or bottled away until they burst. Through it all, Efron battles with ever-increasing savagery in the ring, trying desperately to keep a lid on his feelings. His body is equipped to fight and to win; it also is visual evidence of the kind of choking masculinity Kevin forces himself to inhabit.

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Zac is featured on the cover of The Rake! I have added photos from his photoshoot along with scans from the magazine! Enjoy!

THE RAKE – Zac Efron has a cold. O.K., he doesn’t, but I must admit that as I prepared to interview him, I sensed I was having a Gay Talese moment, and so I couldn’t help but start this piece by evoking Talese’s famous 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra. Like Sinatra, Efron is monumentally well known — facially, anyhow. Hollywood is a magnet for opinions, the public has been thirsty ever since the lights to the iconic sign were switched on, and while technology and the media have changed how information is digested, curiosity and gossip have only intensified certain aspects of the human condition.

One of Zac’s admirable qualities is that his trajectory to (stratospheric) stardom came, unlike Sinatra, from a very young age, where the cultural tendency is for the general public to demand every detail of a performer’s private life and to obsess over his or her ups and downs. And yet, as a result of what I can only assume is an abundance of prudence — a mature head screwed firmly onto young shoulders — precious little is known about Zac, his passions, his personality, and his private life. The phenomenon that was High School Musical turned the then-teenaged Efron into an instant pin-up, vulnerable to all of the as-yet-unaddressed dangers that young stars face when a press corps and a screaming fan base stare back.

At this point, I want to settle nerves about the subject matter. This story does not spend the next however-many words delving into cheap gossip or (frankly unworthy-of-The Rake) hearsay about private matters, but the context in which Zac and I talked — notably the limitations of the actors’ strike in the U.S., which was ongoing when our interview took place — meant that I was able to dwell on Efron the man, and his motivations. In his journey so far, a king has emerged from a pulchritudinous harlequin, and his place now is as the sensitive hero, statesmanlike and dignified.

In his new movie, The Iron Claw, we learn lessons about how dedication, both physical and mental, helps develop a character on screen and off. Zac plays Kevin Von Erich, one of the Von Erich brothers from a famous wrestling family in the era of professional wrestling that preceded W.W.E. The film follows these young men under the whip-hand of their pushy father in a story that ultimately becomes a Shakespearean tragedy, and farce rolled into one. The Iron Claw is the name of the finishing move the brothers use in the ring, but the metaphor of a father’s vice-like grip on his children and their choices does not go unnoticed.

So the film is about the boys, but it is also about the responsibilities of fatherhood and what it means to push or control your children, knowing that children are wired to want your approval and to love you despite the harshness, almost to a farcical extent. Of course, as we view the film through a contemporary lens, we do so understand more about what kind of behaviours are or are not toxic and how our environment affects us. The movie also comes wrapped up in 1980s hairdos and a Rush soundtrack.

Efron says: “Very specific to the Von Erich brothers was this ride to peak stardom in pro wrestling. They really created a dynasty of the best pro wrestlers if not in Texas then maybe ever on camera, especially in this era. Initially they were outsiders who worked their way in, and a lot of it was because of their father, who was a ruthless albeit effective coach to them. He had a style that was — if you look at it by today’s standards — it would probably be too much to handle. These guys were training like monsters to essentially live up to their dad’s hopes and dreams.”
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Zac and his The Iron Claw co-stars, Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson cover Entertainment Weekly! Check out the new shoot in the gallery and an interview below!

The stars of The Iron Claw may not be blood relatives, but spending an afternoon with them feels a lot like hanging out with three actual brothers. In between takes at their EW cover shoot in late October, Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, and Harris Dickinson have an easy camaraderie — finishing each other’s sentences and walking together in step as they navigate a dusty mountain road above a Simi Valley horse ranch at sunset.

As with all siblings, spiritual or otherwise, there’s plenty of good-natured ribbing — sometimes literally. Around lunchtime, a crew member hands Efron, White, and Dickinson a plate of ribs to eat on camera, and before long, all three are coated in a fine layer of barbecue sauce. But even as they poke fun at the stains on each other’s shirts, they really just seem content to hang out. Later (after a change of clothes), they sit down for an interview, and when asked how they trained to play members of the legendary Von Erich wrestling family in the new biopic, they mostly just want to heap praise on one another.

“I was blown away on the first day that you guys came to work,” Efron, 36, marvels. “You were jumping off ropes and doing huge hits.”

“We had some time [training] in L.A.,” White, 32, replies. “But I don’t know, Zac, I never saw you not good at anything.”

Dickinson, 27, admits to occasionally feeling silly in the ring, especially when their wrestling coach told them to go home and punch pillows for practice. But the British actor’s onscreen brothers won’t stand for any self-deprecation. “From the moment you come out, you’re just doing heavy drops on the mat,” Efron tells him, his voice tinged with eldest brother pride, not unlike the Von Erich brother he plays in the film. “And your claw is killer.”

That fraternal bond serves them well in The Iron Claw (out Dec. 22), the highly anticipated A24 drama about one of wrestling’s most iconic dynasties. The film focuses on four of the six Von Erich brothers — Kevin (Efron), David (Dickinson), Kerry (White), and Mike (Stanley Simons) — who built a wrestling empire in the 1970s and ’80s, led by their domineering father Fritz (Mindhunter’s Holt McCallany). But even as they rose to international fame, the family struggled both in and outside of the ring. Five of the Von Erich brothers (all except Kevin) died young, succumbing to health issues, tragic accidents, or suicide. The back-to-back deaths sparked rumors of a family curse — a cautionary tale of how sometimes success can exact a brutal price.

Read more at EW.com

Yay! Zac is on the October cover of Men’s Health! He looks so great! You can check out the photoshoot in the gallery and his interview below. I will add scans later when the magazine releases!

MEN’S HEALTH – WELL, THERE THEY ARE. After Zac Efron removes his jacket and drapes it over the chair beside him, my eyes immediately zoop to his biceps peeking out from beneath his T-shirt. I spot a vein so protuberant that it looks like it’s about to exit his skin.

I had seen Efron’s biceps earlier, while on set for his photo shoot. When I got to the ranch in the hills north of Malibu, he was zooming about on an ATV, doing wild circles around the photographer and creating a cloud of dust. The sharp lines of his arms were apparent even through a dust tornado and even from a safe distance away.

When he arrives at the steakhouse in Thousand Oaks, where the staff has squirreled us away in a back room behind the kitchen, Efron positions himself as though to background the biceps—leaning forward, with his hands loosely intertwined on the table—and I feel louche for peeking.

I feel even loucher for writing about them, but the thing is, Efron’s arms have become part of his whole deal, appendages to his identity as well as to his torso—to say nothing of the torso itself. In 2017’s Baywatch, his onscreen abs looked almost painted on. That film was a fit-guy debutant waltz for Efron. People started looking very closely at his body after that.

Efron has been under scrutiny since 2006, when, at age 17, he played a wholesome, peppy, Bieber-haired Disney jock in High School Musical. Next, he starred in a slew of romances, rom-coms, and com-coms: Neighbors, The Lucky One, We Are Your Friends, That Awkward Moment, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, et cetera ad infinitum. His list of titles is stunningly long, and wildly varied, for someone so young; after Baywatch, he began veering toward dramas and shot a Netflix travel show about sustainability called Down to Earth with Zac Efron. (Season 2 drops in late fall.)

Then the pandemic hit, and the guy who could do it all—and who, since he was a teenager, had been doing it all, all the time—did very little. He sequestered himself in Byron Bay, a beachy haven in Australia. He slept on a hammock in the trees. He dated a civilian. He took moonlit swims with phosphorescent plankton that glowed around him with every motion.

Meanwhile, everyone else was still talking about his body. In July 2020, as Netflix viewers began watching Down to Earth, some commented on his “dad bod”—which, to be clear, was a dad bod only relative to his lifeguard bod. The New York Post called it “a far cry from his ripped physique in Baywatch”; Twitter called him Daddy.

A world away, Efron, too, was rethinking the body he’d become known for. He was reconsidering how he ate (vegan), how he trained (really hard), and how he slept (poorly). Efron, like many of us, has newly emerged from his own pandemic cocoon, blinking in the sunlight, ready to unfurl a revamped personality with back-to-school optimism. Besides a new health and fitness philosophy, Efron has a new movie—The Greatest Beer Run Ever (premiering September 30 on Apple TV+), in which he acts opposite Russell Crowe and Bill Murray—and new career cravings.
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