How Zac Got Jacked

Zac Efron has gone from goofy High School Musical teen heartthrob to aman that we’d all love to look like. He reveals to MF how he’s transformed his body – and turned his life around in the process – for a series of leading Hollywood roles, including this summer’s revamped Baywatch, and how he gets his highs from pushing his mind andmuscles to the limit.

- Josh Dean

If you want to see Zac Efron with his shirt off, you won’t have to search too long for the right film.In 2016 alone you had Bad Neighbours 2, in which he was frequently shirtless, and Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates, which displayed his abs on the poster. And now there’s this summer’s big-screen adaptation of 1990s TV series Baywatch, in which he’s routinely running on the beach wearing –no-surprise-here–nothing more that those legendary red trunks and a whistle. A quick search online for Efron yields hundreds of pictures of him in the shape of his life,while looking him upon Instagram leads you to his many, many recent beefcake photos from the Baywatch set, where he and co-star Dwayne“The Rock” Johnson evidently spent their spare time engaged in bare-chested tyre-flipping contests.

Though Efron, now 29, worked very hard to achieve his physique (the same shirtless torso that, in 2014’s Bad Neighbours, caused Seth Rogen’s character to say, “He looks like something a gay guy designed in a laboratory”) and works even harder to maintain it, he’s also aware the subject has begun to spin out of control. The breathless online coverage of his pecs, lats, and delts expands daily, ranging from fawning (“This Woman Spraying Zac Efron’s Body Has Your Dream Job!”) to potentially disturbing (“Are buff male stars like Zac Efron driving young men to drugs and eating disorders?”).