Flying High

As costars in The Greatest Showman, Zac Efron and Zendaya have soared well beyond their Disney days. In a Cherchez la Femme first, we offer a he-said, she-said take on life in the center ring.

- Mickey Rapkin

 Zac Efron and Zendaya run away with the circus in this month’s The Greatest Showman—a movie musical about P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) and the birth of show business. Efron, 30, is Barnum’s reluctant protégé; Zendaya, 21, plays a trapeze artist and Efron’s love interest. The pairing makes delicious sense, and not just because of the heat they generate onscreen (and, for the record, it’s very hot). Both actors grew up in California, were raised by supportive parents whose marriages ultimately went south, and got their starts on the Disney Channel. At 18, Efron became the singing, dancing, basketball-dribbling Troy in High School Musical, which made him famous and then infamous, his face slapped on everything from toothbrushes to TMZ. Zendaya—also a singer who released an eponymous album in 2013—for her part, seems to have learned something from the previous generation, wresting control of the machine from the outset. She was a producer on her show, K.C. Undercover, about a teenage spy, and memorably forced the network to change the show’s title, telling executives: “Do I look like a Katy to you?” Now both actors have moved beyond their mouse ears: Efron’s been a leading man in hits from Hairspray to Neighbors, and Zendaya, after popping up in Beyoncé’s music video for “All Night,” stole scene after scene in last summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming as the droll loner Michelle Jones (she returns for the 2019 sequel). Here, Zac and Zendaya talk training for the big top, the songs that make them cry, and the relationship between Hollywood stardom and politics.

ELLE: Tell me about the worst day of training on The Greatest Showman. Zac, I read somewhere you were covered in Tiger Balm and wincing.