Bye-bye, High School Musical.
Zac Efron is more than ready to walk away from the Disney bubble.
"You know, everything I've done in the past has felt very safe, and it was great for a while, but now I'm looking for a place to take chances," Efron tells Milk director Gus Van Sant in the new issue of Interview magazine. "I want to play with things."
But he realizes the important people in this town may not be ready to play with him.
"Most of the directors I'd want to work with don't even know who I am," he admits. "Their daughters might."
The paparazzi certainly know him. Efron says he's getting better at dealing with the almost always-present photographers following him. "It's pretty weird," says Efron, who will next be seen in 17 Again and Me and Orson Welles. "I'm definitely making leaps and strides in figuring out how to keep my head down, and that's completely liberating. You know, it's legal to take pictures, but it's also legal to hide."
As for the not-so-squeaky-clean pics of Efron in the mag (look for more to post Tuesday on their website), he says the session with photographer Mikael Jansson was "definitely different from anything" he had done before.
"There was, like a giant sandbox in the middle of a studio," Efron says. "And then I just got to roll around in the dirt for a couple of hours. I got pretty dirty by the end of it, so that was fun."
We think it's fun, too. We'll take dirty Zac over pretty boy Troy anytime.