Leave a napkin on a table? Efron will pick it up and toss it in the garbage. Need to squeeze into an elevator? He will make sure there's room. And if several people are heading toward a building entrance, the actor will dash ahead to hold the door open.

All this may be testament to his solid upbringing - raised in California by middle-class parents - or evidence of canny grooming by publicists, who earlier this month shepherded the star to Washington to talk up the importance of high school arts education in visits to Capitol Hill and the White House.

Still, such attention to etiquette is one clue that the 22-year-old has made the leap from squeaky-clean singing teen to considerate, mature adult. With the new film, set in 1937, Efron seems to be carefully steering his career toward meatier roles.

"It wasn't another musical," he says. "It was definitely a step forward in my opinion, and a risk, and something that I wasn't even expecting of myself at the time, so I knew no-one else would be. It would be kind of a curveball," he says.

The film again features Efron as a high school student who acts and sings on a Broadway production with the temperamental Welles. But the curveballs come from the sophistication of the material. His character has an affair with an older and nakedly ambitious woman (Claire Danes). He also recites a lot of Shakespeare and deals with the prospect of getting fired, giving Efron the opportunity to delve into more dramatic territory.

Danes and Efron agree that it can be a challenge for an actor to land truly adult roles once he becomes associated with teen fare.

"I kind of became the poster girl for teen angst, which is a kind of crass way of saying it," Danes recalls of her gig as the brooding Angela Chase on My So- Called Life.

"The challenge right now is finding specifically what to try and work on next," Efron adds.

"It's not in terms of people being close-minded. Maybe it was for a little while. But I was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from where [Danes] started, in High School Musical.

"Like [she] said, everything that you want to do and everything that I aspire to do as an artist is always that project that's just out of reach."

There is a pivotal scene in Me and Orson Welles when Efron's character finally blows up at his egocentric director. It's a moment that must resonate with Efron, but he says he would never talk to an authority figure that way.

It seems he has already learned that you always win more respect by holding the door open for others instead of screaming about the few who won't let you in.

THE WASHINGTON POST