Ashley Tisdale Jokes Zac Efron Was Her Worst On-Screen Kiss: 'I Closed My Mouth So Fast'
Ashley Tisdale is kissing and telling!
The 34-year-old actress revealed with whom she shared her worst on-screen kiss, and it happens to be one of her close friends and fellow Disney Channel alums.
“I’ll tell you why it was the worst, okay? I had to kiss Zac Efron on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and it’s the worst because I am so close to him and he’s like my brother,” Tisdale said in an episode of Elle magazine’s “Thirst Trap” interview series on YouTube.
“At the time, he was used to acting on like, Warner Brothers, which is CW, and we were on Disney Channel,” Tisdale explained, noting the difference between the two networks. “And so he like, he tried kissing me with his tongue, and I was like, get away from me! I closed my mouth so fast.”
“I was like, ‘this is Disney Channel, we don’t kiss like that on Disney Channel!'” she recalled, adding that it was “weird” for her because of their longtime friendship.
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“It’s just weird when you’re so close to somebody, and we’d already done the movie, I’d known him for years before,” she said, referring to co-starring in High School Musical with Efron, 32. “That is why it was the worst. It’s just we’re too close.”
Since their Disney Channel days, both stars have continued their acting careers beyond the High School Musical franchise. Tisdale most recently appeared in the Netflix series Merry Happy Whatever and is also in the CBS series Carol’s Second Act.
Efron, meanwhile, appears in the Facebook Watch series Human Discoveries opposite Anna Kendrick and recently starred as Ted Bundy in the Netflix movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.
While Tisdale and Efron’s chemistry may have been lacking, the Greatest Showman star famously dated their other High School Musical costar, Vanessa Hudgens, for five years.
“It started off really organically,” Hudgens, 31, previously said of her off-screen relationship with Efron, which started in 2005. “I could not have been more grateful to have that relationship at that time.”
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The Princess Switch star added that dating Efron while they both shot to stardom thanks to the popularity of the Disney movies helped to keep her “stabilized and grounded.”
“We kinda blew up. It was this massive phenomenon all of a sudden and [all] eyes were on me,” she said, speaking on The Hollywood Reporter‘s “Awards Chatter” podcast last April. “And it’s just a really weird foreign thing to go through, and by being in a relationship, I feel like it kind of kept me stabilized and grounded, and I had someone to lean on who was going through it as well.”
Tisdale and Hudgens have also maintained a friendship over the years. On Halloween this year, Tisdale gave a shoutout to her longtime pal with a photo of them dressed up for the spooky holiday, writing in the caption, “Happy Halloween 🎃 Missing my Halloween Queen @vanessahudgens.”
