Okay, you bitches need to help a girl out, because I am now totally hot for Zac Efron. I just poured over every word of his truly interesting Details cover profile (for the September issue), and I went through his photo shoot, and I’m kind of in love with him. He seems… sweet. Like a really nice kid. But unlike someone like Taylor Lautner, Zac’s niceness doesn’t seem like the product of being really young and unexposed to the world. Zac’s niceness just seems like something very natural, like he wouldn’t even think to be cruel or anything. He seems to know his own mind too! When the interviewer asks him about dating Vanessa Hudgens and why Zac isn’t out there, “bathing in p-ussy.” Zac’s answer is pretty awesome: “Yeah, everyone tells me that. I think a lot of guys would enjoy that. But I’m not really like that. Believe me. I rack my brain thinking, ‘Why am I not out there playing the field?’ One of my buddies was like, ‘You have no idea what’s going on right now. You’re peaking on Ecstasy and you’re watching TV.’ But it’s not in my heart.” He also talks about the gay rumors! Oh, Zac. I heart you.

On getting a horrible case of poison oak: “I went backpacking over Memorial Day weekend and I just got the worst poison oak, bro,” he says. “It was my first time getting it. Dude, it’s, like, everywhere. Everywhere. I can’t even begin to show you, ’cause you’ll get so grossed out. I look like a zombie from Dawn of the Dead.” Coaxing commences; negotiations occur. “Okay, I’ll show you my back, but the front’s pretty gross, man,” he says, then lifts his shirt. Above the bunched-up waistband of his underwear (boxers, Hanes, blue plaid), half of his back has been taken over by a crust resembling swollen cornflakes. “This spot just popped up this morning. Don’t touch it!” Efron is under the erroneous impression that anyone who touches him will catch his cooties—and maybe even develop a taste for brains.

Efron is not cool: Zac Efron is not cool, and this pronouncement is neither an insult nor a revelation to him. His lack of cool has nothing to do with the fact that, as a preadolescent, he lived for community theater or that he tried to get away with wearing a fedora to school at 15. Cool is effortlessness. Efron is all effort.

Efron is the Anti-Shia LaBeouf: Hollywood, like everything else, is just an extension of high school, with the burnouts and the jocks coexisting uneasily. Burnout Sean Penn drinks and smokes too much and will always be cooler than jock Tom Cruise, whom one imagines doing lots of crunches and high-fives. Same with Shia LaBeouf and Zac Efron. LaBeouf seems to give not one shit. He disses Spielberg and flips pickups and just gets bigger; Efron makes appearances at Bar Mitzvahs as favors to industry friends. “I’m so jealous of that,” Efron says of LaBeouf, whom he doesn’t know personally. “Yeah, that’s awesome to not give a sh-t. And Shia still pulls it off. That’s so cool. It’s just awesome. It just comes easy to some people.”

On Tom Cruise: Hollywood’s upperclassmen have shown how they feel about this freshman. Penn, upon meeting Efron, reportedly said exactly two words to him: Go skydiving. But Cruise recently flagged Efron down in the lobby of CAA. “You ride motorcycles?” Cruise asked him. Alas, he didn’t. “You wanna learn how?” Cruise invited him out to his house, taught him how a motorcycle engine works, showed him the hangar with his dozens of pristine bikes—including the Triumphs he rode in the Mission: Impossible movies. Efron was allowed to ride a pedigree-less dirt bike. “He made so many great movies,” Efron says of Cruise. “I get the feeling that he works really, really hard. It didn’t come from swagger with him. It came from dedication, hard work. You see it in the way he physicalizes everything. You watch The Last Samurai and that’s him! He’s really doing that.” I ask Efron why he supposes Cruise bothered reaching out to him. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t even want to know. It’s just so cool that he gave a sh-t, the fact that he cared at all. No one else did that.”

On backing out of Footloose: “All the things I loved about Footloose I couldn’t find in the project,” he says. “They just weren’t there. I couldn’t see myself doing it.”

On letting water run on his poison-oak infected skin: “Oh…my…God,” Efron says with a gasp. “It’s like the best…orgasm…ever! And I just keep coming!”

On Vanessa Hudgens and why he‘s not “bathing in p-ssy”: Here in the bathroom, the topic of other bathrooms comes up, specifically the Japanese one at the famous Los Angeles sushi place Matsuhisa, which has a bidet-like contraption that will essentially shampoo your anus. “Yeah, Vanessa has one of those,” he says, speaking for the first time of his girlfriend of five years, High School Musical costar Vanessa Hudgens, who had dropped him off tonight. By now the Lakers are well on their way to winning the game and the bottle of Cab is gone, not more than a quarter of it consumed by Efron himself, which may explain the coarse phrasing of my suggestion that now might be the time for him to immerse himself in the company of more than one lady friend. “Bathe in p-ssy?” he repeats. “Yeah, everyone tells me that. I think a lot of guys would enjoy that. But I’m not really like that.” I point out that he does not know if he would enjoy this or not, since he has never been famous and single. “Believe me,” he says. “I rack my brain thinking, ‘Why am I not out there playing the field?’ One of my buddies was like, ‘You have no idea what’s going on right now. You’re peaking on Ecstasy and you’re watching TV.’ But it’s not in my heart.”

On the gay rumors and the rumor that Vanessa is his beard: “That’s just f-cking insane,” he says. “I’ve never even heard of that happening. I don’t even know who I would have been around who would have thought that was even a good idea. It would have been so much easier to call it off a long time ago.” Efron sees it as just wishful thinking by an avaricious gossip industry. “They want you to believe it, and they hope they’ll influence you to break up by making you seem insane for being in it. And then you’ll play the field, and then they can write about you a sh-tload, make shit up, and speculate about everything. Right now they know exactly what’s going on and it’s not very interesting and there’s no money to be made on it. It’s exactly how it should be. It’s real.”

[From Details Magazine]

Isn’t my new boyfriend funny? Isn’t he sweet? Doesn’t he have pretty eyes? Sigh… yes, he’s not Gerard Butler, but he’s got potential. Serious potential. Oh, and I think Tom Cruise was hitting on him, right? I mean, Tom could have just been trying to be generous to a young, up-and-coming star, but it also seems like it was a date, right?

Photos courtesy of Details.