How Zac Efron Became the Cutest Guy Ever

What happened to the coarsening of our culture? By now, to be a teen heartthrob, you should have done time in rehab, videotaped yourself having sex or been shot in the face at least once. But instead we’ve gone backward, from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Leonardo DiCaprio to Justin Timberlake to Zac Efron. By 2020, 12-year-old girls will be decorating their lockers with photos of the surgeon general.

Past teen idols often got famous for delivering slightly gritty entertainment: a hip swivel, a risqué rock song, having sex on a sinking ship. But now that there are enough cable stations, websites and radio stations to give tweens their own swath of broadband, the kids have chosen to be on the far right of all right. For their generation’s defining piece of art they overwhelmingly chose last year’s High School Musical, a song-and-dance movie made for the Disney Channel that is so wholesome the Amish community playhouse could put it on.

None of which got in the way of its enormous success: The sound track was the No. 1 album of 2006; more than 2,000 schools have put on productions of the show; a series of books about the characters sold 4.5 million copies; the concert tour sold out all 42 of its arenas; the live show is touring 70 cities; and, of course, bucks are being made on High School Musical: The Ice Tour. Efron, the star of the movie and of the slightly bigger-budget sequel that debuts on Aug. 17, High School Musical 2–in which he plays a jock with a bowl haircut who just wants to save money for college and sing about it to his mathlete girlfriend–is among the biggest stars tweens have had since they wore bobby socks. Which, at this rate, they’ll probably be putting on soon.

Efron isn’t surprised that wholesomeness is what kids want since, growing up in a small town near the small town of San Luis Obispo, Calif., he didn’t think teen movies were very realistic. “Not everyone is an alcoholic in high school,” says Efron. “You go to high school and some kids haven’t hit puberty yet.” In fact, though he’s 19 years old, Efron’s voice still has a squeak to it, which fits in with his appeal as the anti-rehab kid. Though paparazzi follow him, especially after his supporting role in last month’s Hairspray, the only change he’s made is putting a shirt on when driving. The worst thing they’ve caught him doing is kissing his High School Musical co-star, Vanessa Hudgens, on a beach in Hawaii; Efron won’t even say she’s his girlfriend, even though he has her on the background screen of his iPhone. His biggest scandal is that his voice was overdubbed with another guy’s singing in High School Musical (he rectified that in the second). Efron tries to say nothing worthy of a gossip-column item. “I don’t have much to worry about,” he says, “because my personal life isn’t that interesting.”

People are nevertheless very, very interested. Those over 20 without children at home may not be aware of Efron, but everyone else is. Girls slept outside on the street of his hotel every night when he was filming Hairspray. He’s so gooed over by girls that I Hate Zac Efron clubs have been popping up at high schools (including the school his cousin attends). He has been a teen-mag fixture for the past year and a half, appearing somewhere on the cover of every Tiger Beat and Bop, according to their editor’s estimation, during that time. Efron props up teen publishing the way China props up the world’s economy.

Until a year and a half ago, his personal life was particularly uninteresting. Efron was living at home, having his mom drive him to auditions about twice a month in Los Angeles, where they would sleep on a cousin’s couch. He got a few guest roles on TV shows, but his parents gave him 12 months to make a living as an actor or else he’d have to go to USC, where he had deferred his freshman year. Time was about up when an actor friend told him he’d tried out for a Disney musical, and Efron’s agent got him in for the last day of auditions. “The only thing that separates me from 200 brown-haired, blue-eyed guys in L.A. is one single audition. I’ll never forget that,” he says. “I can’t imagine how I got picked. I don’t think I deserve to be here in any way.” Efron has never said a sentence that would not work if you added “aw shucks” to the beginning of it.

Though he masks it with charm, Efron pushes hard, maybe a little too hard, on the normal-guy thing. He frets about coming off as arrogant. He lives in a rented apartment in the Valley–not even a nice part of the Valley–which he cleans himself, or, more accurately, doesn’t. He says he has no interest in fame, which is why he is one of the few High School Musical stars not to have signed a record contract. And why he refuses to have lunch at the Ivy, where people go to be shot by paparazzi. “I can get an equally good sandwich at Quiznos: the honey mustard chicken sandwich with bacon on whole wheat. It’s pretty cheap. If I buy a foot-long sandwich, it’s like two meals.” No, two made-for-TV movies and a role in Hairspray won’t make you rich, but still, dude can buy a panini.

He’s so normal, he wants you to know, he is obviously not as ridiculously vanilla as the characters he’s played. Like, he’s totally not anti-kissing, even though he and Hudgens didn’t do it in the first Disney movie. “I’m the last person to think a kiss is going to corrupt any child. Kissing is a great thing,” he says. Also, he plays video games. Violent ones. “It’s bull____ that guns in video games cause murders. The last thing I would ever do is hurt another person, and online I probably kill 200 guys a day.” Moreover, while he plans on starring in the big-screen release of the next High School Musical he admits that those movies aren’t his type of entertainment: “I couldn’t get through the first one.”

What he’d rather be doing, and what he was in fact doing a few hours before we met for an iced chai in the Valley, is meeting with folks like Francis Ford Coppola about a role. Coppola asked Efron, who is a musical savant, to try to stump him with obscure show songs. Coppola missed only one, from Avenue Q, but he belted the rest right at Efron. “Believe it or not, he’s got a pretty rich baritone. It’s kind of great. I must be one of the few people he sang to, and it’s an honor,” he says. Efron’s also in talks to remake Footloose as well as make a movie called Seventeen, in which a grown-up gets stuck inside a teenager’s body due to, I’m guessing, an accident involving electricity.

His next few roles will determine if he stays a teen idol or becomes a star that adults without kids will know. Leesa Coble, the editor of Tiger Beat and Bop, thinks he’s already phased out of her demo. “When people are on the cover of Rolling Stone and in People, that’s sort of a sign for us that the peak has happened for our readers,” she says. “You don’t want to like what your parents like.”

In Hairspray, he became that, partially because of the good-student, athlete competitiveness he brings to acting. “I made him jump on the bed and make out with this photograph. I mean really make out,” says Hairspray director Adam Shankman. “He would just do it–but do it with such a level of total abandonment and commitment. The only people who I see that from are really genuinely good actors. He was always asking for more takes. Never satisfied.”

But the competitiveness does not come across as aggressive. “He radiates this sense of attainability–as if anyone who meets him can be his friend,” says Gary March, the entertainment president of the Disney Channel. “That’s not something you learn in acting class. That’s something you’re born with.” High School Musical co-star Monique Coleman says, “He also has a way of wooing the women by including them. By making every single girl feel like they could be his girlfriend.”

If that’s true, if Efron really has gone through life as the good-looking theater geek who’s also good at sports and with girls and who has mastered humility as a counterattack against schadenfreude, then maybe he can work this charm thing into a career. And, if not, he can join a weird religion, drive drunk or leave his wife for another woman. You know, the things adults do to hang on to fame.