With successful career and a famous girlfriend who enjoys taking nude photos, Zac Efron may the hottest guy on the Disney payroll. But the High School Musical star hasn’t always been so cool.

“I was average,” he says in the April issue of Family Circle.

Zac, 21, insists he was nothing like his HSM alter-ego, high school basketball star Troy Bolton.

“I had a lot of friends but I was not in that ultra cool circle. I was a bit of a class clown. I guess to get through the tedium of the quadratic formula, I thought everyone was fair game.”

He added: “Between self-discovery and the social hierarchy, high school can be the most confusing time of your life.”