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After walking out of my screening of The Iron Claw, the foremost thought in my mind — other than the almost biblical tragedy of the Von Erich family itself — was: “Man, it’s pretty awesome that Zac Efron turned out to be a legitimately good actor.”
I thought, and now say that to you, because as a 30-year-old millennial, my first introduction to the now 36-year-old Efron was as the guy in High School Musical that all the girls in my 7th-grade class had a crush on. Being compared to Efron isn’t ideal for anyone, let alone teenage boys going through puberty.
From there, Efron would go on to appear in a handful of teen-focused films such as 17 Again, Charlie St. Cloud, and New Year’s Eve, followed by 20s-focused films such as Neighbors, That Awkward Moment, We Are Your Friends, Dirty Grandpa, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Neighbors 2, and Baywatch.
These movies are ultimately all the same in the sense that their sole purpose is to entertain and to make a profit — there’s hard work put into these films, sure, but no genuine sense of artistic endeavor.
In 2017, though, Efron began to branch out, expanding the audience’s idea of what sort of talent he is with films like The Greatest Showman while also playing against type in projects such as The Beach Bum and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Efron then parlayed that stretch of brave swings with starring roles in a remake of Stephen King’s Firestarter and Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever.
When you add up the decade of work and the 14 films I’ve just named, you get a serviceable, mid-tier movie star who is perhaps better at making money than art, being a face and a body rather than a layered performance. But thanks to his work in The Iron Claw, that is no longer the case. And it will never be again.
While Efron’s physical transformation for the role of Kevin Von Erich is striking — as if his muscles were sculpted from Italian granite — it’s what that hulking frame is protecting and reckoning with on the inside that makes The Iron Claw one of the best films of the year.
Playing the eldest living brother, Efron also assumes the role of pseudo-dad to his younger siblings, as both his father (Holt McCallany) and mother (Maura Tierney) are unrelenting in their pursuit of the midwestern American dream, no matter the cost, leaving Efron’s Kevin be the moral compass and caretaker of the lot.
All the while, Efron is a young man himself, building his career, chasing his own goals, and grappling with the demons that his way of life bred in him, and the realization of what their father has done to them.
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As such, given all of the dogged disaster that the family like a curse (their words, not mine), Efron, in his role of both brother and emotional custodian, is left to carry all of the above — the career ambitions, well-being, and stability of both himself and his loved ones — on his shoulders alone.
Despite life pinning him down to a two-count time and time again, though, he always gets back up before the third and final.
And regardless of how crowded of a race it may be this year, it’s a performance worthy of a Best Actor nomination.
THE IRON CLAW hits theaters on Friday, December 22.