Zac Efron May Not Have Sang in ‘High School Musical’ but He Did Belt out a Note for ‘The Greatest Showman’

Get’cha head in the game! Troy Bolton was good at two things during his reign as the superstar athlete in High School Musical — basketball and singing. Yet, Zac Efron, who is known for playing the role of Troy, didn’t actually sing in the first High School Musical movie. Basically, he just lip-synced to another singer’s voice and the world took it as his own.

Zac has since owned up to the fact that it was a singer by the name of Drew Seeley whose voice HSM fanatics fell in love with and not his. In an old interview, he explained that he had to actually “fight” to get his vocals on the second and third movies’ soundtracks. “In the first movie, after everything was recorded, my voice was not on them. I was not really given an explanation. It just kind of happened that way. Unfortunately, it put me in an awkward position. It’s not something I expected to be addressed. Then High School Musical blew up,” he shared.

But, Zac can obviously sing — he lent his vocals to other very successful musicals including Hairspray and the most recently, The Greatest Showman. In a recent interview with his co-star Zendaya — another former Disney Channel star— he cleared up whether or not the pair sang live or recorded later on and apparently it was both!

Zendaya explained that they previously recorded what she called a “skeleton track” and Zac said that was done “so that you know what notes what you have to hit and what sort of cadence you want to sing at but you have to really sing on the day or it looks fake.” Zac also mentioned that sometimes things needed to be added to the song further into filming, which meant he would have to go back into the studio and re-record the track.

So while he can take credit for what fans hear while watching and listening to The Greatest Showman’s soundtrack, he can’t quite say the same for the original High School Musical movie.