Vanessa Hudgens Reflects on Her Past Relationship With Ex Zac Efron: ‘So Cute’

The podcast isn’t the first time Hudgens has touched how easily the pair clicked when they first met.

“We got lucky because we started off together, so I think people like us because they fell in love with the characters,” Hudgens told Glamour of her then-boyfriend during a June 2010 interview. “Right off the bat, we had a connection. I think everybody could see it. When we had our audition, they paired us together. And he was adorable. I mean, he wasn’t the guy that he is today. Like, he had a gap in his teeth.”

Efron also previously noted their early chemistry in the audition rooms during an interview with Disney in 2007.

“For all of the partner things, me and Vanessa always got paired up,” Efron said at the time. “I was like, ‘They’re not trying us with other people.’ For some reason, we kept sticking around [for callbacks]. I don’t know what it was with Vanessa, but we kind of clicked from the very beginning.”

Although it’s been over a decade since the former couple called it quits, Hudgens has always appeared to be grateful for her romance with Efron in that phase of her life.

“I could not have been more grateful to have that relationship at the time … It was this massive phenomenon and [all] eyes were on me,” Hudgens said during an April 2019 appearance on the “Always Chatter” podcast. “And it’s just a really weird foreign thing to go through, and by being in a relationship, it kind of kept me stabilized and grounded, and I had someone to lean on who was going through it as well.”