Daily Front Row

2012 April 20

Getting Lucky With (Well, Near) Efron

Comments | | Print

Taylor Schilling and Zac Efron
Patrick McMullan View Gallery

(NEW YORK) The latest Nicholas Sparks film adaptation, The Lucky One, brought out those in need of a good misty-eyed romfest and/or an eyeful of a grown-up, jacked-up Zac Efron at last eve's Cinema Society and Men's Health screening of the flick at the Crosby Street Hotel.

Though Efron was clad in impeccably-cut Balenciaga suiting for the screening, his most recent style discovery was of a far more casual persuasion. "I just found a t-shirt that said 'racks on racks on racks.' That was a good moment," Efron mused before his attention was completely eclipsed by a flurry of tall, blonde-tressedness a few steps away, in the form of mods Doutzen Kroes and Erin Heatherton. T's certainly resonated more with Efron's on-screen chic quotient than any Ghesquiere-crafted ensembles. "The fashion in this film? It was nonexistent!" said Efron. His character's biceps, a couple symbolic dogtags, and a handsome German Shepherd could be counted as excellent accoutrements, though.

"Luck is directly proportional to however many risks I take," said Efron's co-star, Taylor Schilling, clad in a trim gray Calvin Klein number. Case in point: "moving to New York when I was 17! I have so many stories; on two occasions, I've had to move everything I owned within 24 hours. That was really fun. Everyone in my phone got a call from me. I learned that if you provide pizza and beer, suddenly you have a village!" 

"My teen heartthrob was Josh Hartnett, after I saw Pearl Harbor had his poster and everything!" revealed Heatherton. "But that was a teen thing. I don't think I'd freak out with him now." Try telling that to the throng of iPhone-clutching ladies who clustered and politely elbowed pre-screening to nab a shot of Efron.

Also on the premises, besides Efron: the flick's director, Scott Hicks, costars Blythe Danner and Schilling, Men's Health EIC Dave Zinczenko, plus Maggie Rizer, Katie Lee, Nicky Hilton, SNL's Abby Elliott avec Vanessa Bayer, and Natasha Bedingfield. Post-screening, it was time for a Grey Goose Le Fizz cocktail or two and perhaps some potstickers for the famished with a side of poolside rooftop views at Jimmy at the James Hotel. Do those vistas ever get old? Don't answer that; rhetorical question...
ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV