Updated October 22, 2026
Zac Efron put on 15 pounds of muscle to play the wrestler Kevin Von Erich, a figure he gave Variety on December 14, 2023, and it is the only weight figure in any interview on this page. The body people actually search for, the Baywatch one from 2017, came with no number from him at all, only a verdict, delivered to Sean Evans on Hot Ones on April 2, 2020: “I don’t ever want to be in that good of shape again.”
This page is the sequence, role by role, in his words and his trainer’s one number, and it separates two stories the before-and-after galleries keep gluing together: the body, which is a run of jobs, and the face, which is a fall at home on November 10, 2013, explained by Efron himself nine years later.
2014: Neighbors, “wake up, work out and then go to set”
The fraternity president in Neighbors was the first role in which Efron’s body was the premise of the joke rather than the reward at the end of the romance, and he trained for it like a man clocking in. “It just seemed like whenever we felt like it, no hesitation,” he told E! News at the South by Southwest premiere in March 2014, in a report published on March 9, when asked how often he is shirtless in the film. “It was like wake up, work out and then go to set and party all day.” Between takes he did push-ups in a corner he thought was private.
The following summer he went the other way on purpose. “It was fun to go backwards and play a DJ and more skinny, svelte guy,” he said at the London premiere of We Are Your Friends in August 2015. Asked about the lifeguard film he had just signed, he said, “I’ve got to outswim the Rock.”
2016 to 2017: Baywatch, nine days without carbs
The Baywatch preparation is the best documented stretch of his career because he documented it himself, in real time, and then spent five years taking it back. On March 8, 2016, he posted a training photo on Instagram: “Months and months of training for this moment… Bring it on @therock.” In the same stretch he tweeted “[Nine] days of absolutely zero carbs & sugar. Only organic grassfed/free range protein and organic leafy greens,” as Yahoo quoted it in 2020, and on March 9, 2016 a cheat-day inventory that ran from a steak through three desserts to a brick of cheese and caviar:
https://twitter.com/ZacEfron/status/707442604481355778
That list is the most honest document of the year, because it prices the diet in the only currency he seemed to care about at the time.
The only number from that year comes from his trainer, Patrick Murphy, who told Men’s Fitness that Efron reached 5 percent body fat after 12 weeks of supersets (Coach reprinted the plan on May 22, 2017). Efron has never confirmed the 5 or given a weight for the role, and the body outlived the film by a wide margin.
2020 to 2022: the retraction, “it’s just stupid”
The first retraction was a joke with a fact inside it. On Hot Ones in April 2020, promoting his Quibi series Killing Zac Efron, he told Sean Evans: “When I was done with that movie, I don’t ever want to be in that good of shape again. Really. It was so hard. You’re working with almost no wiggle room, right? You’ve got things like water under your skin that you’re worrying about, making your six-pack into a four-pack. S–t like that, it’s just not… it’s just stupid.”
The second retraction was the fact with the joke removed. In the Men’s Health cover story for the October 2022 issue (quotes ran September 7, the magazine hit stands September 13), he described a 4 a.m. alarm, the same three meals every day, and the chemistry underneath the look. “That Baywatch look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable,” he said. “There’s just too little water in the skin. Like, it’s fake; it looks CGI’d. And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve. So I don’t need to do that. I much prefer to have an extra, you know, 2 to 3 percent body fat.” Then the cost: “I started to develop insomnia, and I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time. … Ultimately they chalked it up to taking way too many diuretics for way too long, and it messed something up.” By the magazine’s account it was six months after the wrap before he felt like himself. Pin-up and cautionary tale in the same magazine is a rare double, and he managed it in one interview.
2013 and 2021: the jaw, “the masseters just grew”
The face has its own date. On November 10, 2013, Efron fell at home; Entertainment Tonight, confirming an E! News report on November 12, said he had broken his jaw and that his mouth was wired shut; the 2013 reports blamed a puddle near his front entrance. Nobody mentioned the jaw again until April 2021, when he appeared in Bill Nye’s Earth Day video with a visibly heavier lower face and the surgery rumor began. His mother, Starla Baskett, phoned to ask whether he had had work done, which is how he learned the rumor existed.
His own account came in that same Men’s Health story. He had been running through the house in socks, slipped and caught his chin on the corner of a granite fountain. He passed out and woke up with, in the magazine’s words, his chin bone hanging off his face. The physical therapy for the facial muscles stopped while he filmed the Netflix series Down to Earth in Australia, and the muscles that had been compensating kept growing. “The masseters just grew,” he said. “They just got really, really big.” A week later, at the Toronto film festival on September 13, 2022, he gave Entertainment Tonight the short version: “It sucks. I almost died, but we’re good.” The puddle of 2013 and the socks of 2022 are the same fall told by different people, and only one of them was there.
2022 to 2023: The Iron Claw, 15 pounds and no social life
A24 released its first look of him mid-air in the ring on November 7, 2022; Variety’s December 2023 profile supplied the method a year later. “That necessity to be perfect, it became an obsession,” he said. “It was a singular focus for months. And your life goes out the window during prep.” He started with volume training to add 15 pounds of muscle, “then I was able to incorporate old-school body-building and Olympic lifting.” At the Dallas premiere on November 8, 2023, he told Access Hollywood he had started about six months before filming and called it “the hardest thing I’ve ever done”; Variety’s profile calls it an eight-month process, and he has not reconciled the two.
What he said about Baywatch this time was the sentence the 2017 version of him could not have said: “I learned the hard way about not sacrificing my real health for a look on camera. I had the right questions to ask for this one.” The new body had its own bill. “Having all that weight on, you don’t feel normal,” he told Variety. “And the delayed-onset muscle soreness was through the roof. … I found myself withdrawing quite a bit.” The film opened December 22, 2023, and at the Los Angeles premiere he told The Hollywood Reporter, “In the best way possible, I did not look anything like me.” The Prince Valiant bowl cut, as Variety described it, did half of that. The other half was the first body he had built for a character rather than a poster.
2024: A Family Affair, “happy and healthy”
The Netflix romantic comedy with Nicole Kidman, released June 28, 2024, was shot from August to October 2022, before the wrestling cameras rolled, and its script addresses the face directly: his movie-star character points to the scar under his jaw and says, “I did have surgery, though. I fell on set, some broken glass.” It is the screenwriters’ joke on a true story, and the closest Efron has come to a statement on the subject since Toronto.
On August 2, 2024, TMZ reported, citing unnamed sources, that he had been pulled from the pool of a villa in Ibiza and taken to hospital overnight; his representatives stated that he was “fine”, as Marie Claire reported, and that week he posted an Instagram story of himself training in a garden: “Happy and healthy – thanks for the well wishes.” Everything beyond his own story is anonymous, and he has not added to it.
2025 to 2026: Famous, Judgment Day and a paparazzo for HBO
Three jobs are waiting and none has come with a number. Famous, Jody Hill’s thriller for A24 in which he plays a movie star and the lookalike fan who trades on the resemblance, with a cast reported by Deadline; Judgment Day, Nicholas Stoller’s comedy for Amazon MGM with Will Ferrell, which The Hollywood Reporter described on May 2, 2025 with no release date, and neither had one in those reports. On May 28, 2026, Deadline reported that he will star in and executive produce Angel Heart, a series for HBO and A24, as a down-and-out New York paparazzo hired to find a missing woman. He has claimed no transformation for any of the three. His own first word on the series was an Instagram post on June 2, 2026, with HBO and A24 tagged: “Honored to make this one with HBO & A24. Let’s go!”
Where this leaves him
Efron’s chart has one number on it, the 15 pounds for Von Erich, and a nine-year gap in the paperwork for everything else. The lifeguard body was built on diuretics and a 4 a.m. alarm and cost him, by the magazine’s account, six months before he felt like himself; the wrestler body was built on volume and soreness and cost him a social life for a season. Both were jobs, and he says the second one was done properly. The face was never a project at all. He fell on a fountain in his socks, and it took him until 2022 to say so, because he does not read the internet and his mother does.
Sources
- Variety: Zac Efron Wrestles With His Legacy (profile; 15 pounds, “obsession”, “don’t feel normal”, the Baywatch lesson), Dec 14, 2023
- Yahoo Entertainment: Zac Efron on his Baywatch abs: “I never want to be in that good of shape again” (Hot Ones, the March 2016 tweet), Apr 2, 2020
- First We Feast: Zac Efron Ups the Ante While Eating Spicy Wings | Hot Ones (video), Apr 2, 2020
- Fox News: Zac Efron is completely shredded for upcoming movie about Kevin Von Erich (set photos; full Hot Ones quote), Oct 26, 2022
- Entertainment Tonight: Zac Efron Reveals ‘Baywatch’ Body Transformation Led to ‘Bad Depression, Insomnia’ (Men’s Health October 2022 cover quotes: Lasix, 4 a.m., six months), Sep 7, 2022
- Tom + Lorenzo: Zac Efron Covers the October Issue of Men’s Health (cover quotes incl. “I was just miserable”; on-sale date Sep 13), Sep 7, 2022
- Audacy: Zac Efron addresses plastic surgery rumors (Men’s Health: socks, fountain, “the masseters just grew”, mother’s call, Earth Day video), Sep 8, 2022
- Entertainment Tonight: Zac Efron Says He ‘Almost Died’ After Shattering His Jaw (TIFF interview), Sep 14, 2022
- Entertainment Tonight: Zac Efron Breaks Jaw, Has Mouth Wired Shut (Nov 10, 2013 fall, E! News report), Nov 12, 2013
- Today: Zac Efron Jaw Accident: How Has His Face Changed? (A Family Affair shooting dates and script line, THR premiere quote, Down to Earth physical therapy), Dec 13, 2023, updated Jul 16, 2025
- E! News: Zac Efron Shows Off Hot Body “A Lot” in Raunchy New Movie Neighbors (SXSW quotes, push-ups, Steve McQueen), Mar 9, 2014
- Highland Radio (PA): Zac Efron enjoyed being less buff in We Are Your Friends (London premiere quotes), Aug 12, 2015
- Refinery29: Zac Efron Baywatch Diet Cheat Day (Mar 8, 2016 Instagram post and Mar 9, 2016 tweet, verbatim), Mar 10, 2016
- Coach, reprinting Men’s Fitness: The Workout Plan Zac Efron Used To Build A Baywatch Body (Patrick Murphy: 5 percent body fat after 12 weeks), May 22, 2017
- Fightful, quoting Access Hollywood: Zac Efron on getting into shape for The Iron Claw, Dallas premiere Nov 8, 2023 (six months, “hardest thing”), Nov 11, 2023
- AceShowbiz, quoting Metro: Zac Efron struggled with ‘pretty debilitating’ soreness while making The Iron Claw (“you just feel old”, underwear between takes), Feb 17, 2024
- Variety: Zac Efron Bulks Up to the Extreme in A24’s ‘The Iron Claw’ First Look, Nov 7, 2022
- Marie Claire UK: Zac Efron has broken his silence after being found in a pool in Ibiza (Instagram story “Happy and healthy”, rep’s statement), Aug 5, 2024
- TheWrap: Zac Efron Shot a Full Fake ‘Hot Ones’ Episode for ‘A Family Affair’ (Netflix release), Jun 28, 2024
- Wikipedia: Famous (film), Deadline-sourced cast
- The Hollywood Reporter: Heidi Gardner, Bobby Ray Join Will Ferrell’s Amazon Movie Judgment Day (plot, no release date), May 2, 2025
- Dread Central, quoting Deadline: Zac Efron to star in and produce Angel Heart series for HBO and A24, May 28, 2026
- Wikipedia: Zac Efron (birth date, release years, Australia move)
