Zac Efron

Efron's professional acting career started in the early 2000s (TMDB), though the moment everything changed was 2006 — the year Disney Channel aired the original High School Musical. He played Troy Bolton, a high school athlete who discovers he'd rather sing than just shoot hoops, and the role made him a household name almost overnight. Two sequels followed through 2008, cementing the franchise's grip on a generation of viewers. He didn't stay in that lane. Hairspray (2007) showed he could hold his own in a full-scale Hollywood musical alongside a stacked cast, and the Screen Actors Guild Award nomination he received for it was an early signal that the industry was taking him seriously beyond the Disney ecosystem. The comedy 17 Again (2009) kept his momentum going, and through the early 2010s he stacked a varied slate — New Year's Eve (2011), The Lucky One (2012), The Paperboy (2012) — before Neighbors (2014) became a genuine box-office hit that repositioned him as a viable comedy lead for adult audiences. Dirty Grandpa (2016) and Baywatch (2017) followed in a similar register, and The Greatest Showman (2017) pulled him back into the musical space that first defined him. The dramatic gear-shift came with Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019), where he played Ted Bundy — a casting choice that raised eyebrows but one he committed to fully. Then The Iron Claw (2023), his portrayal of real-life wrestling legend Kevin Von Erich, arrived as what many critics considered his most emotionally demanding work to date (Wikipedia). Sandwiched in there: a Daytime Emmy win in 2021 for Down to Earth with Zac Efron, the Netflix travel series he hosted across 2020–2022 (TMDB). Three distinct career phases, and he's navigated all of them.