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Zac Efron Will Play Infamous Serial Killer Ted Bundy

Um, why are Disney stars playing murderers all of a sudden?

After Ross Lynch played serial killer Jeffery Dahmer in the new movie My Friend Dahmer, a fellow Disney alum is taking on another infamous killer on film.

Zac Efron is totally, unequivocally breaking free from his Disney Channel past by stepping into the role of Ted Bundy, one of America's most infamous serial killers of the 20th century. If Efron's raunchy, R-rated comedies over the last few years haven't helped distance him from his Disney days, this new project surely will.

The High School Musical star will anchor Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a new film told from the perspective of Bundy's longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, who was stubbornly loyal to Bundy but eventually betrayed him to the police. Joe Berlinger (of the Paradise Lost documentary series) is slated to direct.

If you're not a true-crime buff, Bundy was a conventionally handsome and charming guy who found many of his female victims on college campuses in the 1970s. He confessed to 30 murders, evaded capture for years, jumped out of a second-story courthouse window, and sawed his way out of prison before being convicted and eventually executed in 1989. Now picture HSM's Troy Bolton doing all of that.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is due to start shooting in October 2017.

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