Zac Efron covers the latest issue of Hollywood Reporter to promote his role as a shirtless fratboy in Neighbors. The trade paper is calling Zac’s role a “career reinvention” that will make up for the commercial bombs of Zac’s last few years. Zac enjoyed a time of enormous success with the High School Musical franchise. Everyone knows that child stardom rarely translates into adult success, but Zac’s still trying to make it happen. He’s not a bad actor and does have charisma. I think Zac would have a decent shot if he got sober. His recent Skid Row melee looked really sketchy. The explanations that followed only made the situation worse. The tabloids followed up by talking about Zac’s mysterious broken jaw, which was also sketchy and possibly drug related. What a mess.

Zac paints a very wholesome portrait of himself with HR. He often appears “lost in thought” and talks of his work-related anxiety and insomnia. He insists that he’s “living an ultrafit life” and works out daily, eats clean, and only drinks special alkaline-loaded water. He talks about the Skid Row incident in well-rehearsed terms. Zac claims to go to bed at 9pm and swears he’s not partying anymore. Do you believe him?

The trauma of young success: “No matter who you are, you face challenges growing up. You go with your things, you learn, you have to. It’s impossible to lead an honest and fulfilling life as a man and not make mistakes and ‘fess up to them when you need to. But it’s especially humiliating when they happen to be so public and so scrutinized. When you have success young, and you accept the good things, you have to accept all of it. You have to accept the moments of glory but also a great responsibility. And that responsibility, to some degree, involves being a role model. At the same time, I’m a human being, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve learned from each one.”

His substance abuse: “I was drinking a lot, way too much,” he says, acknowledging there were drugs, too. “It’s never one specific thing. I mean, you’re in your 20s, single, going through life in Hollywood, you know? Everything is thrown at you. I wouldn’t take anything back; I needed to learn everything I did. But it was an interesting journey, to say the least.”

About that Skid Row fight: “I had a friend come pick me up late at night — we were looking for a place downtown to get a bite and catch up. We were having trouble finding somewhere — a lot of places were closed — and the car ran out of gas off the 110. It was ridiculous. We had to pull over, and I called Uber. A homeless guy, or vagrant, tapped on the driver’s-side window. Before I knew it, he [the friend] was out of the car, and they started fighting. I saw that [the homeless man] was carrying some sort of a knife, or shank, and I got out of the car to disarm him. At some point, he dropped the knife, and I got hit pretty hard in the face — and almost instantly the police were there to break up the fight.” Efron calls it “the most terrifying moment in my life.”

He joined AA: “I just started going. And I think it’s changed my life. I’m much more comfortable in my own skin. Things are so much easier now. It’s a never-ending struggle.”

On shooting Neighbors: “The best part of the shoot by far was hanging out with Seth and the guys. The hardest part? Every single day was more or less a party. You went into this kind of dream state: You show up, it’s dark, and there’s a raging party. Drive home, and the sun’s up, go to sleep and then get back to set. Glow lights, girls in bikinis, electronic dance music blasting in between takes, people jumping around. It was pretty cool, but it was a lot. It was a lot. It sort of became real.”

His High School Musical success: “I’m grateful for every bit of that early success. 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.”

He pulled out of the Footloose remake: “I was aching to do it. 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 [Ortega] because I adore him so much.”

His future career: “I’m constantly searching for characters that are about betterment of self and betterment of others. And I’m searching for those parts because those are the ones that make me happy. They’re the ones that fulfill me personally.”

Why he turned to drugs & alcohol: “There was something lacking, some sort of hole that I couldn’t really fill up.” Work, he says, “started to become the reason to go anywhere, the reason to talk to anybody. The phone calls I received were regarding [work], the ones I wanted to make were regarding scripts or to producers. Slowly but surely, I was no longer living in my house. It was just hotel to hotel. So my hobbies went out the window. I was just so deep into my work, it was really the only thing I had,” he says. “I clung to it in a way that became a little bit destructive.”

He’s all better now: “Without those moments where you feel like your lowest, it’s impossible to appreciate the high ones. But I sit here in front of you today much happier and healthier than I’ve probably ever been.”

[From Hollywood Reporter]

I want to believe that Zac is on the straight and narrow, but the Skid Row situation makes it hard to believe he’s not still drugging. He previously claimed to be healthy and happy after rehab, but recent accounts say he never really went to rehab (only individual therapy sessions). If he’s really in AA now, that’s one thing, but a real rehab progam would have helped even more.

Zac’s been fudging the truth about his career too. On the Neighbors red carpet, he fronted like he could have a Star Wars role. Yesterday’s official annoucement put Zac nowhere near the movie. He’s probably playing fast and loose with the truth because desperately wants this “career reinvention” to succeed. Why wouldn’t he want that? If he’s not clean, then the success can only last so long. I wish him only the best, but it’s hard to be optimistic when so many other actors have lied about sobriety.

Photos courtesy of Hollywood Reporter