Me and Orson Welles

ZAC EFRON (Richard Samuels) was born and raised in Northern California. One of Hollywood's most promising young talents, his career in film and television continues to evolve with exciting and challenging projects. Moving effortlessly between the big and small screen, Zac quickly attracted attention and became the breakout star of the Emmy Award®-winning Disney Channel phenomenon "High School Musical." He reprised his role as Troy Bolton, head of the basketball team, in "High School Musical 2", which broke cable TV records in the US as it garnered 17.5 million viewers, and again in "High School Musical 3: Senior Year", which grossed in excess of $250 million at cinemas worldwide. His other television credits include a recurring role on the WB series "Summerland" and guest-starring roles on "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody", "ER", "The Guardian", "Firefly" and "C.S.I. Miami". Zac starred on stage in the musical "Gypsy" and has appeared in productions of "Peter Pan", "Mame", "Little Shop of Horrors" and "The Music Man". He made his feature film debut in the box-office hit "Hairspray", for which he won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Performance. The film won the Critics Choice award for Best Ensemble and the cast was also nominated for a Golden Globe and SAG Award. Most recently he starred alongside Matthew Perry and Leslie Mann in the film "17 Again", a "Big"-like comedy drama in which a 36-year-old man wakes up in the body of a high school senior. Zac announced recently that he was dropping out of the remake of "Footloose" to move away from musical roles. His next project will be "The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud" for writer/director Burr Steers, which will go into production late 2009 in Vancouver.

CLAIRE DANES (Sonja Jones) was born in Manhattan, New York City and first came to public attention in 1994, in the television drama series "My So-Called Life", winning a Golden Globe® Award and an Emmy® nomination for her performance as Angela Chase. She made a number of feature films in the next four years, including Baz Luhrmann's groundbreaking "Romeo + Juliet", with Leonardo DiCaprio, Oliver Stone's "U Turn" and Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rainmaker". In 1998, she followed her father and grandfather to Yale University for two years as a psychology major, before leaving to focus on her film career. An accomplished stage actress and dancer, she is best known for her starring roles in a wide range of films such as Jonathan Kaplan's "Brokedown Palace", Stephen Daldry's "The Hours", in which she played Meryl Streep's daughter, Jonathan Mostow's "Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines", Richard Eyre's "Stage Beauty", Anand Tucker's "Shopgirl", Thomas Bezucha's "The Family Stone", Lajos Koltai's "Evening", Matthew Vaughn's "Stardust" and Andrew Lau's "The Flock". In October, 2007, she made her Broadway stage debut, starring as Eliza Doolittle in a revival of George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion". Her next film project will be the lead role in "Temple Grandin", HBO Films' biopic of an autistic woman who became a best-selling author and one of the top scientists in the field of humane livestock handling.

CHRISTIAN McKAY (Orson Welles) began his musical education as a chorister at Manchester Cathedral, before studying piano at Chetham's School of Music and, subsequently, at the University of York, the Royal College of Music and the Queensland Conservatorium in Australia. After several years touring Europe and Australia as a successful and critically-acclaimed concert pianist, he turned to acting, training at RADA (The Royal College of Dramatic Art). On graduation, he was recommended by Lord (Richard) Attenborough to the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in "Anthony and Cleopatra" at Stratford-Upon-Avon and in London's West End. His other successful stage appearances include his award-winning performance as Orson Welles in "Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles" at the Edinburgh Festival and in London, Toronto and New York. His feature film debut, "Abraham's Point", with Mackenzie Crook, was completed shortly before he began work on ME AND ORSON WELLES. He can next be seen in Bernard Rose's biopic of drug smuggler turned author and raconteur Howard Marks, "Mr. Nice" and the new untitled Woody Allen film which has just completed principal photography.

RICHARD LINKLATER was born in Houston, Texas, and attended Sam Houston State University, before leaving to work on offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Moving to Austin, he founded the Austin Film Society in 1985, to showcase films from around the world that were not typically shown in the city. He began work on his debut film as writer/director, 1988's "It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books" and, three years later, he wrote, produced and directed "Slacker", which became an Indie sensation in the early '90s. Despite its minuscule budget, the movie became the subject of considerable mainstream media attention, with the term "slacker" becoming a much-overused catch-all epithet for America's disaffected youth. In 1993, he wrote and directed "Dazed and Confused", another influential and popular coming-of-age comedy. Next, Linklater made "Before Sunrise", a romance set in Vienna, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Nine years later, he, Hawke and Delpy received Oscar® nominations for their screenplay of "Before Sunset" which continued the lovers' story in Paris. His eclectic canon continued with "SubUrbia", based on the Eric Bogosian play; "The Newton Boys", a 1920s-set historical crime drama; "Waking Life", an animated feature based on live-action; "Tape", based on Stephen Belber's three-character one-act play; the short film "Live From Shiva's Dance Floor", featuring 'Speed' Levitch; the international comedy hit "School of Rock", starring Jack Black; "$5.15/Hr.", an ensemble comedy about restaurant workers; "Bad News Bears", a remake of the hit baseball comedy; "Fast Food Nation", a searching dramatic examination of the burger business; Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", an animated futuristic thriller starring Keanu Reeves and, most recently, "Inning By Inning: A Portrait of a Coach", a documentary about University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido. Linklater continues to serve as the Artistic Director for The Austin Film Society, which has given out almost $1,000,000 in grants to Texas filmmakers and in 1999, received the first National Honoree Award from the Directors Guild of America in recognition of its support of the arts. Future projects include the return of Jack Black's Dewey Finn, who will lead a group of summer school students on a cross-country field trip in "School of Rock 2: America Rocks".