The lamentation of St. Zac Efron

Your face is huge on that poster.

“I know, right,” Zac Efron says. “Oh wait, check this out.”

Efron, 22-year-old teen dream, pops up from the leather ottoman he’s lounging on and runs into the next room, leans over his hotel bed flashing his dark-colored briefs underneath his jeans in the process — somewhere a teen girl weeps and she doesn’t know why — and grabs his iPhone 4. He bounds back into the room flicking through images on the phone.

“A buddy who was in Times Square sent this to me,” he says while holding the phone so I can see the image: it’s Efron larger-than-life on the poster of his new movie, Charlie St. Cloud. The poster must be 50 feet tall and 150 feet wide. His eyes stare off the edge of the poster right up the spread legs of a Victoria Secret lingerie model who happens to have found placement above him in the New York City skyline — and she's ready to sit on his face.

“I’m looking right at her ass,” he says, noticeably pleased with the comedy of the two ads create. “Thank you, New York.”

Efron, that plucky young kid from the High School Musical series, is growing up, and the proof is in his persistent survival post-HSM. First there was the starring role in 17 Again, one of those goofy body-switch movies in the vein of Freaky Friday. Then there was Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater’s critical darling about Welles’ famous staging of Julius Caesar, a film that no doubt left tweens wondering aloud who Orson Welles was and why he was taking screen time away from Zac.

And now Efron has Charlie St. Cloud, a film in which he’s the unmistakable lead — he plays the title character — and he’s five years removed from high school, which means he’s playing roughly his own age, a bonus for any HSM breakout. “I’m done aging down for a character,” Efron says from his upscale Phoenix hotel room, “but I will age up. The studios are really pandering to a younger crowd by casting older actors in younger roles. Audiences are so much smarter than we give them credit for.”

In the film, he plays a property manager of a cemetery who meets his dead brother every day at sundown to play catch. They chat, reminisce and altogether delay the inevitable day when Charlie must let go, and the brother must venture onward into eternity. There’s also some business with a girl who’s going to sail around the world, and how she’s driving Charlie away from his dead brother. At one point they have sex in the graveyard, to which the women in the audience coo'd and moaned — I laughed hysterically: "They just fucked on a headstone!" The film also is notable for starring two veteran actors — Ray Liotta and Kim Basinger — and giving them nothing to do.

I ask Efron about this, particularly about Oscar winner Basinger, who looks electric in all 3½ minutes she's on the screen only to disappear after her mindless cameo. Was her role originally larger, because it seems pointless to have Basinger there when an extra could have done it just as good? I kept thinking she was going to pop up again. Efron, protecting his director, Burr Steers — Steers, besides directing Efron's 17 Again, was also in Pulp Fiction as the guy on the couch shot by Jules — explains Basinger's disappearance like this: "Hey, when Kim Basinger can be your mom, why not?"

Charlie St. Cloud is not a great movie. It’s one of those pandering melodramatic cheeseballs, the kind that are usually penned by Nicholas Sparks, or some Nicholas Sparks-programmed robot. But even inside this stinker, Efron seems to shine. I’m convinced he can play very serious, but hasn’t yet been given the opportunity. He has this complexity to his gaze, like a dreamier River Phoenix — “Thanks,” he says, “Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies.” But if he's not careful he can drift from River Phoenix to Boone from Lost, who just whined too much and ultimately fell off a plane and died.

How do you pick roles?

Efron, back on the ottoman, his eyes wander, his feet shuffle: “I play it by ear. The voice of the character, can I hear it? What’s learned, what’s the message? Is it cool, is it fun, do I see myself having fun during shooting? What is the rest of the cast like? These are questions I ask myself before I decide … Right now I’m more excited about broadening — or having the potential for broadening — my fan base’s experience at the movies, to see how they respond to more real, more grounded plots.”

But don’t you get a lot of scripts trying to break you with drugs, alcohol, sex or violence? There’s probably a price on your head to get you to do a bad boy role that plays against your High School Musical days.

“I would never do anything like that just to do it … one of those ‘bad boy’ roles,” he says, “but I think if there was an amazing role where I was playing a well-written character who was also slightly villainous I would do it. I would never play bad for the sake of playing bad, and believe me we’ve been given those chances since the first High School Musical.”

In a passing comment, Efron admits to frequenting theaters in the Los Angeles area. It’s hard to imagine movie stars watching other movies. It’s easier to just picture them always on the screen as opposed to basking in its glow like us, the general populace. He and his longtime girlfriend, fellow High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens — who he is not shy to talk about in front of writers — make it their date night.

“I prefer to see movies at the theater. When I have time off, and if 7-o’clock rolls around and we have nothing to do we’ll go to the movies. No one really bothers us at the theater. People are buying candy and stuff, so no one really notices us. We’ll probably see three movies a week.”

It’s ironic you can find peace — from fans and the paparazzi — at a movie theater of all places.

“I know, right; it’s great,” Efron says. “Also I don’t have a great sound system at my house. Vanessa has a great theater system at home, big screen and everything, so movies are definitely better there, but we prefer to go out.”

Then he admits something: “I still haven’t seen the finished product of Charlie St. Cloud.”
That seems rather odd to me, not because stars should be required to see themselves on the screen — Clooney doesn’t, Nicholson doesn’t — but because Efron is so young, and ego drives the young in Hollywood. There’s this attitude that if you’re young and talented that you’re going to be the next big thing. Lindsay Lohan, now locked in an isolation cell somewhere, probably thought that way. How do you stay so grounded in Los Angeles, I ask.

“I get out [of LA] as much as possible. Also, I’ve been protected and helped. I get uncomfortable around the paparazzi and too much attention, so I never put myself in those situations. Hollywood is just not my thing.”

It’s working so far, though.