Interview: Vanessa Hudgens
Can’t Stop the Music
Just because Vanessa Hudgens plays a singing teen in her new movie Bandslam doesn’t mean it’s anything like that other role she’s famous for. Seriously.
By Ingrid Randoja
Vanessa Hudgens has one more closing number left in her.
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The members of the band I Can't Go On,
I'll Go On in Bandslam
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However, it isn’t as Gabriella Montez, the sweet good girl she played in the mega-successful High School Musical franchise, but rather as a surly teen who steps out of her shell in the clever musical comedy Bandslam.
The brainchild of writer/director Todd Graff, Bandslam stars
Gaelan Connell as teenaged Will, a shy music geek who transfers to a
high school in New Jersey. Will’s encyclopedic knowledge of music
impresses sexy senior Charlotte (Aly Michalka), who asks Will to
transform her garage band into a well-oiled musical machine capable of
winning the epic battle of the bands competition called Bandslam.
Hudgens plays Sa5m, “it’s pronounced Sam, the 5 is silent,” says
Hudgen’s character, a sarcastic, book-reading loner who carries a torch
for Will. “It’s a different character from anything I’ve ever done
before so it was nice to step into someone else’s shoes,” says Hudgens
on the line from Los Angeles. “She’s dark, introverted, very deadpan
and monotone.”
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Sa5m also possesses some hardcore musical talent, which comes to the forefront during Bandslam. Graff, an actor turned filmmaker (he played the wisecracking Hippy in The Abyss), shot the movie in the indie music hotspot of Austin, Texas, and insisted that every actor he cast be able to play his/her musical instrument in the movie — there would be no lame, fake guitar strumming in his film.
Too bad no one told Hudgens about that. “Honestly, they didn’t even tell me I would have to play,” she says, still sounding a bit surprised. “I read the script and it said I was playing, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool, whatever.’ And then I found out I would play and we had a few weeks of band rehearsal, which was a lot of fun ’cause I got to learn how to play the guitar.”
Hudgens makes a convincing rock chick, complete with the de rigueur guitar on the hip stance and pouty lips. It seems the entire cast gleaned some of their best moves from the Rock Band videogame.” I looove Rock Band,” says Hudgens. “We played Rock Band a lot on set, and it was a lot of fun, it was our bonding time.”
And what was her song of choice?
“For some reason I got stuck singing ‘Creep’ by Radiohead a lot.”
She sounds unfazed about the musical challenges she faced on set, which makes sense when you consider the 20-year-old native of Salinas, California, is a show-business veteran, beginning her musical theatre career at the age of eight when she starred in local stage productions, and making her feature film debut at 15 in director Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen.
When HSM exploded she was suddenly a 16-year-old television superstar and best-selling recording artist. The microscope she lived under clicked to a higher magnification when it was revealed she was dating HSM co-star Zac Efron, and the scrutiny became unbearable in 2007 when private nude photos of Hudgens surfaced online.
Yet Hudgens proved to be Teflon-coated, apologizing for her lapse in judgment and surviving a scandal that could have derailed her career before it really took off. And Bandslam proves she has the acting chops to survive in a post-HSM world, if only Hollywood movie execs would stop sending her HSM retread scripts.
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Vanessa Hudgens and Gaelan Connell
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“The things that I really like are, of course, the things I really
have to fight for because they are different,” she says of the roles
she wants to play. Her boyfriend Efron complains of the same problem,
and you wonder who she thinks has had an easier time making that
transition to more adult fare — him or her? “I don’t necessarily think
it’s an easy thing in general,” she says diplomatically. “You just have
to be smart and it doesn’t matter who you are, you just have to be
smart about what you’re doing and really be focused.”
So could Hudgens — not Efron — be HSM’s breakout star?
She just finished filming Beastly in Montreal, which is a modern-day take on the Beauty and the Beast
fable in which a spoiled young man (Alex Pettyfer) is turned into a
horrible monster, and Hudgens plays the girl who can break the spell.
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But the big news is that cutting-edge director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) cast Hudgens in his next film, Sucker Punch, due out in 2011. She joins castmates Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Emily Browning in the female-only action flick about a girl in a mental institution who retreats into a fantasy world where she fights against her tormentors. Hudgens plays Blondie, one of the institution’s inmates, in this movie Snyder refers to as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.”
However, kicking butts and toting a gun are yet to come, the Hudgens we spoke with was on hiatus, back home in L.A. having returned from Bandslam’s Austin set. “I’m just kind of waiting since I’m going to have to do two movies in a row, so I’m just relaxing before the storm.”
And what does that entail? “Hang out, relax at home, do nothing. Avoid my phone,” she says with a laugh.
To be honest, it’s difficult to believe someone who’s been performing since she was eight could really sit still and do nothing. When pushed, she does concede she’s no couch potato. “I have been getting antsy, yes, but I definitely have the ability to relax. I think I’m going to start photography, and I’ve been working out a lot — Pilates, boxing, spinning and hiking. And it’s always nice driving around with the top down.”
Although, at least one aspect of filming Bandslam in Austin was relaxing as well.
“It was my very first time there, and there were no paparazzi, which was nice. You could just walk around everywhere, it was really artsy and there was really cool music.
“It was nice to just wake up in my pyjamas, go downstairs and walk my dog.”
Ingrid Randoja is the deputy editor of Famous.
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CBGB lives!
There’s a sweet scene in Bandslam in which stars Gaelan
Connell and Vanessa Hudgens make a pilgrimage to New York’s famed CBGB,
the grotty, hole-in-the-wall music club that hosted punk and new wave
bands such as the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads when
they were just starting out.
And the fact that CBGB was shut down and stripped bare in 2006 didn’t
deter director Todd Graff — who actually played there many times with
his former band, The Pedantics — from fudging history and recreating
the club on a soundstage in Austin, Texas, to include in his film.
Using books, photos and Graff’s personal memories, the production team
spent weeks gluing stickers onto the walls, spraying graffiti and
building the club’s rickety stage, ultimately creating a loving homage
to a lost piece of rock ’n’ roll history.
—Ingrid Randoja
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