Zac Efron Was Heartbroken After His Acting Was Criticized in This Audition
Zac Efron became a household name after starring in Disney’s High School Musical. And although he’s proven to be a capable actor since then with plenty of range, there was one audition that wounded his confidence.
Zac Efron was asked if he ever acted before after this disastrous audition
Efron may have achieved success at a very early age, but his road there wasn’t the smoothest. Before High School Musical, he was slowly building his acting credits in shows like Firefly and ER. However, there was one role earlier on that not only eluded him, but devastated him at the time. When he was 15, Efron auditioned for a live action Peter Pan show.
“I showed up and it was on tape in this tiny room. On stage you speak to the back of the room and you project and Peter Pan is very animated and jumping off things and going crazy so that’s what I did in the audition, running around and jumping off my chair, singing the lines,” Efron once told WENN (via Broadway).
But in the middle of the audition, Efron was given some pretty harsh feedback.
“This woman interrupted me and goes ‘you’ve never done this before have you?’ and I went ‘no’ and she went ‘okay, you can go’ and that was the worst audition ever, ever in my life. I kind of wept about that one,” he said.
Zac Efron was almost done with acting before ‘High School Musical’
High School Musical wasn’t only a life-changing experience for Efron, but potentially a career-saving one as well. Before starring in the hit TV show as Troy Bolton, he was getting ready to put his Hollywood career on hold. His plan was to study film at USC, when he received a call to audition for a mysterious new Disney TV movie.
“My mom dropped me off out of a minivan somewhere in North Hollywood,” Efron once told The Hollywood Reporter. “I had no idea what to expect. There were about 40 guys. And we walked in, and [director] Kenny Ortega was there with a piano, and they put everybody in a room together, and we ran through different phases of what we would need to do — first dancing, then singing — and a few of us got tapped on the shoulder [to leave], and I didn’t. And next came the scene-reading sections, and I got paired with Vanessa Hudgens.”
The series was what sent Efron’s career into the stratosphere. And it was a time in hid life that he’s seemingly never taken for granted.
“I’m grateful for every bit of that early success,” he said. “It was hands down the most honest, carefree, passionate experience of my life. There were no expectations. [But later] I definitely felt that pressure. I’m not comfortable with it at all times. The people that I saw and the people that I started to meet, the majority were young. These were kids, and I looked into their eyes and I saw myself as a fan, and it was shocking to be on the other end of that. You just want to please every single one.”
Zac Efron once refused to do another musical
Efron had a chance to team up with his High School Musical director Ortega again for a Footloose remake. The feature would’ve seen Efron go back to his roots a little bit as, not only an actor, but a performer. But by the time he was offered the role, Efron was looking for more variety in his career. And Footloose seemed to feel like more of the same to the actor.
“I was aching to do it,” he said. “It just sounded like so much fun. But I knew if I did that, it would ultimately be limiting. And at that point, I was really searching for something else. It was never about money for me, [but] the hardest part was saying no to Kenny because I adore him so much.”
The film’s producer, Craig Zadan, revealed that he asked several other actors for advice on doing the picture.
“What he had done was extremely smart. He’d picked actors he admired and went to them and said, ‘If you were me, what would you do?’ He spoke to Tom Cruise, a lot of people. And he said, ‘I’m not going to do another musical for a long time.’ It was smart, but it was also sad,” Zadan recalled.
