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EOnline.com:The High School Musical star, who successfully made the transfer to the big screen in last year’s Hairspray, has signed on to star in director Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, an adaptation of Robert Kaplow’s 1930s-era coming-of-age novel, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Efron will star as high school senior Richard Samuels—an age and grade level the actor knows well—who, while walking the streets of Manhattan one day, comes across Orson Welles’ still unopened Mercury Theater, where the Shakespearean auteur, pre-Citizen Kane, is staging a production of Julius Caesar.
Richard lands a bit part in the play and does a lot of growing up during his brief time under Welles’ tutelage.
Ben Chaplin is on board to play the real-life English film and stage actor George Coulouris, and newcomer Christian McKay will play Welles.
Efron can expect to be busy shooting the film in such locations as New York, London and the Isle of Man in mid February and March, giving him just enough time to get ready for High School.
The 20-year-old will reunite with his Disney Channel mates for High School Musical 3: Senior Year, the first film in the billion-dollar franchise that’s intended for theatrical release. Production is set to kick off in April, with director Kenny Ortega once again behind the scenes.
Efron, who proved he could shake and shimmy with the big boys in Hairspray and was anointed the New American Heartthrob on the cover of Rolling Stone last summer, inked a reported $3 million deal to reprise his HSM role as musically inclined basketball star Troy Bolton.
He is currently shooting the Big-in-reverse comedy Seventeen, due out later this year, in which a thirtysomething man wakes up to find himself a high school senior again. He was forced to take a break Tuesday after undergoing an emergency appendectomy but he expects to be back in action soon.
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