Zac Efron said he performed such an over-the-top audition as a child that he was asked to leave the room.

The actor - who plays a teenage student who, by luck, gets to work with a young Orson Welles in the new coming-of-age drama Me and Orson Welles - said the try-out still haunts him now.

“That was my first experience and I had just done the play Peter Pan so I thought I was… I mean, who could be better. We were all quite young and I wasn’t even playing Peter I was playing John but I’d watched loads of actors play Peter so I showed up at the audition and I was dancing around and jumping off things and being crazy like lost boys you know,” Efron recalled.

“I ran around, I jumped up on my chair and started singing the lines and then she interrupted me, she goes, ‘You’ve never done this before have you?’ and I said, ‘no, not at all.’ And she said, ‘OK, you can go.’”

The 22-year-old revealed he broke down in tears after he was rejected. “It was completely my fault; I thought I was auditioning for the play. I kinda wept about that one,” Zac admitted.