Tisdale's been staying busy since the last film of the High School Musical franchise (for her character), working on films and her music. At the LA press day for 20th Century Fox's Aliens in the Attic, the multi-talented actress talked about balancing all of her interests - and kicking some little green alien butt.
The Mood on the Set and Playing It Serious:
"You know, I was laughing nonstop on this film, just because obviously being surrounded by Doris and Kevin Nealon and Andy Richter and Tim Meadows and Robert [Hoffman], it was just a blast. I couldn’t even keep a straight face. But I usually, I think that for my stuff, I definitely feel they’re in a situation where she’s in love with him and that is serious for her. She doesn’t understand what’s going on so I think that yeah, to play up a joke, you definitely come from a serious point of view. I think that’s how I’ve always been. I mean, obviously timing has everything to do with it as well. And I think it was fun for us, but yeah, I think that we definitely took the aliens really seriously."
On the Appeal of Aliens in the Attic:
"I read the script and I thought that obviously it was in the same audience as the other movies that I come from. It’s a family movie and I thought it was really great for my audience. I was hesitant at first on doing it. They asked me to do the movie and I kind of was just like, 'I don’t know.' I really wanted to know what the aliens were going to look like and I wanted to know who was starring in the movie just because of... Carter’s character, my younger brother, was younger and just [being] a young, young movie and when they told me Carter Jenkins signed on, I loved him in a show called Surface on NBC, and I was super excited. I think he’s a great actor and so I signed onto it, and it was an honor. Barry Josephson, who’s produced Enchanted and Men in Black, I knew the CGI would be a piece of cake with him because he’s really good at that."
"But it’s different from the musical movies. It’s an action comedy. [It] had a great cast - Doris Roberts, Kevin Nealon, Andy Richter. I’ve learned so much from them. So, it was all of that together that made me want to do it."
Working with a Bunch of Funny People:
"They don’t even try to be funny and they are. They don’t really one up each other, it’s just like it’s constantly funny. It’s like they just have joke after joke and it’s just like, 'Oh my gosh, you guys crack me up.' It was really hard. It was hard to do scenes with Kevin where I’m off camera and he’s looking to me and he’s ad-libbing. I’m trying to be a supporting actress where I’m just like not laughing in his face, but I can’t help but laughing behind the camera because he just comes up with the funniest things."
About Those Aliens...
"We worked with like green stuffies, which were green dolls. You’d have somebody kind of moving it around and you’d follow it and stuff for eyeline. Sometimes they would have marks where you’d look because all of us actually, with little Ashley and the twins, you needed to all look at the same place, so we’d have marks."
"I’m never intimidated by that stuff. I think stuff that I’m attracted to is always challenging, just because I like to challenge myself and see what I’ve accomplished. But yeah, the CGI I was just going to be like, 'How is this going to work? Are we doing green screen?' And we didn’t really do green screen. Usually where we were filming we had a green screen, well not green screen, like a green stuffy, like a beanbag kind of doll, that was the alien and just move it around and then you react off of it. There were sometimes where I was nervous just because I was only there for five weeks. I had to come back for High School Musical 3, where they were there for six months. And because they’re all younger, at a certain time they were not allowed to work and I would be at 2 o’clock in the morning reacting off of the Doris Roberts and Robert Hoffman fight, and I’d be looking at the crew members. So that kind of made me nervous. But I saw the movie and I think it came together really well."
On Balancing Music and Acting:
"Balancing it is not a challenge. I think the challenge is people taking me seriously for my music and making it – obviously that they’re two separate things to me. I grew up on Broadway and did musical theater my whole life. Music has always been something that’s been part of life, and I’m very creative and co-write my music, the second album 'Guilty Pleasure,' which comes out July 28th, is who I am."
"There are a lot of break up songs, they’re usually about one guy. But the first one I was just getting to know as a artist what I was like, obviously recording, where the second one Warner Brothers Records lets me be very creative, so I got to take control over it and it’s very personal to me. I was not trying to make it personal but it turned out to be personal. Everything behind the album is all my idea, so that makes you a little bit vulnerable, obviously."
If She Had to Choose Which Would Win Out - Acting or Music?
"I think I’m a very creative person and I’m a workaholic so I like to do a lot of things. I like to keep busy. I think I want to have a really long career so I definitely... I love acting - that’s one of my passions and so is music. Producing is different for me, but I do come up with ideas that I’d like to either watch or do movies, and not just even stuff that I would be in. I come up with these ideas and I have a producing partner and we get together and we get to create it. It’s a different experience for me than I’ve ever had before, but it’s a lot of fun. I hope to be producing TV shows and movies one day. Right now I have a reality show that E! is looking at."
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Aliens in the Attic hits theaters on July 31, 2009.
