Celebs
Ashley Tisdale never thought Zac Efron was "hot."

Ashley Tisdale Never Saw Zac Efron As “Hot”

Despite Sharpay’s crush.

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Despite years of filming High School Musical together, Ashley Tisdale said she never caught the Zac Efron fever — no matter how her character might have felt towards Troy Bolton. Apparently, Tisdale never saw Efron as “hot.” During a Nov. 1 episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, the actor opened up about her feelings toward her co-star, and it sounds like she was the only one not crushing on Efron in 2006.

On the show, Tisdale explained to host Amanda Hirsch why she “never thought” of Efron that way. “It's because I was friends with him before the movie. He was way younger than me. He was like a brother, too,” she shared, per People. (For the record, Tisdale is two years older than Efron.) The High School Musical star added, “I think I just knew him too well and had been best friends with him for so long that it's like your brother that you're hanging out with.”

Fair enough, but there was one time when she saw the heartthrob in a more romantic light. “I think the one time where I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Sh*t. Yeah, he looks hot,’ was the Rolling Stone cover,” Tisdale recalled. “I was like, ‘Now I understand.’” The 2007 cover in question features Efron grinning in a white T-shirt, and yeah, fans everywhere melted at the time.

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This isn’t the first time Tisdale has amicably dissed Efron. Back in a December 2019 video for Elle’s Thirst Trap series, the actress dubbed him her “worst” onscreen kiss. “I’ll tell you why it was the worst, okay? I had to kiss Zac Efron on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” she recalled. “At the time, he was used to acting on like, Warner Brothers, which is CW, and we were on Disney Channel,” she said. “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!”

Honestly, it’s probably a good thing that Tisdale never crushed on Efron. At the time, he was kinda busy being Disney’s golden couple with Vanessa Hudgens.