LOS ANGELES—Zac Efron decided to sign up for a film called New Year’s Eve when he heard who he would be working with. He was told by the film’s director, Garry Marshall, that in a film filled with romance vignettes, he would be paired with Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he admits was the object of a crush back in 2007 when they made Hairspray together.

Efron also liked his role of a courier who is told by an older woman named Ingrid (Pfeiffer) that he will receive backstage passes to New York City’s best New Year’s Eve show if he can fulfill her fantasy of seeing the world in one night in New York. The movie opens Friday (December 9).

In a Los Angeles hotel room, however, Pfeiffer says that he wasn’t ready for the sight of her in full makeup as a 50-year-old woman who hasn’t aged well. “I think he was a little disappointed when he opened my trailer door and there sat Ingrid. His little face kind of fell. The sweetest thing about him was that he never let on and he still won’t admit how disappointed he was. But he grew to love her anyway.”

Pfeiffer, who is 53, wasn’t concerned about playing a homely spinster. Her difficulty was figuring out how a woman who had lived her entire life in New York could not know anything about the city. “When I read this part, I said to Garry: ‘This woman has lived in New York and she has never been to any of these places that they go?’ Then I realized that I was very much like her. I came to this conclusion this week, doing interviews alongside Zac. I thought, ‘He is Paul and I am Ingrid! Who knew?’ And I think I came to this conclusion because there is a big part of me that is a hermit.”

Efron admits that he wanted everything to be perfect during the making of the movie. He particularly wanted the one kiss between the 20-ish Paul and the 50-year-old Ingrid to work on film. He says that the key scene, which takes place after the New Year’s Eve ball falls in Times Square, didn’t turn out the way he had planned.

“Every actor performs three scenes in a movie. There is the one you rehearse the night before in your bedroom, and there is the one that you actually get to do when you are filming, and there is the one that you wish you had done afterwards. I was in my hotel the night before, imagining how I was going to kiss her. It was awesome. I was ‘the man’ in every way, with the confetti falling and the big dip and then the kiss. But on the day we did it, a huge piece of confetti went into her mouth at the crucial moment, and no matter how many takes we did, the kiss was wrecked by the confetti.”

Watch the trailer for New Year's Eve.