And the Bandslam Played On

Never mind emo corner boys. It’s the Disney kids we feel sorry for. It’s hard to conceive of a more purgatorial way to spend one’s adolescence than as a clean living idol in the employ of the House of Mouse, but these precious years, in the lifespan of a winsome starlet, will come to represent the good times.
If historical precedent is any indicator, the odds of your shiny teen career surviving into adulthood are slim to non-existent. Every move you make will be wrong. Try too hard to prove you’re a proper grown up and your adult career will most likely be just that, a slow-degrading grind into the world of softcore porn. Leave it too long to jump the good ship Disney and you’ll end up in the same netherworld shared by Hilary Duff and Baby Jane. 
It’s tough out there for a Saturday morning graduate, and yet there are no visible signs of distress around Disney Channel alumni Alyson Michalka when I meet her. 
“This is so great,” shrieks Aly, as she prefers to be known. She gestures girlishly toward the window of her suite in Dublin’s Morrison Hotel. “I’m here, then I’m on my way to Scotland, then on to London. I’m so stoked.”
If she sounds giddy she’s entitled to be. At the tender age of 20, Ms. Michalka is part of a new wave of former Mouseketeers and Nickleodeon pin-ups who have figured a way out of the quagmire that so often seems to sink their teenage colleagues. Josh Peck has been a leading light in this regard, having effortlessly segued from TV dreamboat into production credits and hip indie products like Special and The Wackness. Zac Efron, too, can soon be seen in Me and Orson Welles, his “serious” debut. His one-time co-star, Vanessa Hudgens, has gone one better, by landing a role as a bookish outsider chick opposite Aly Michalka’s reformed cheerleader in Bandslam, a smart, sassy musical comedy featuring an adorable rock god cameo from David Bowie. 
“It’s witty,” nods Ms. Michalka, fresh from the film’s Irish premiere. “It’s great that people have responded so well here. If there’s a couple of things I’ve noticed about the Irish, it’s that you guys love movies and that you’re pretty honest. So compliments about the film are worth more here.”
Despite its Bratz-friendly day-glo promotional campaign and Disney-sourced cast, Bandslam is no High School Musical 4. It is, rather, better understood as this year’s School of Rock or 10 Things I Hate About You with a better score. The musical aspect was both an incentive and a potential deterrent for Ms. Michalka who has repeatedly strived to maintain a comfortable distance between her career as a Disney moppet and her work as a musician, alongside sister Amanda in musical duo 78violet.
“Once I got there, I felt great about making Bandslam,” says the star. “It felt really honest. And Todd Graff the director was so on top of it. But it was a different step for me. I didn’t want to do a music movie in the beginning. My music is very important to me and my acting is very important to me and I didn’t want to combine the two in a cheesy, gimmicky way. But this movie was so different to anything I had been offered before. The characters, their dimensions, their arcs - this isn’t one of those teen movies you get nothing out of. I would have been crazy to pass on it.”
The set also offered an opportunity for bonding with Ms. Hudgens, Aly’s former Disney stable-mate.
“I never got a chance to talk to David Bowie,” laments the actress. “But I formed such great friendships it didn’t matter a bit. Everybody assumed that Vanessa and I knew each other from before, when really we had only ever met each other at crowded Disney events. So now we’ve made up for it.”
Neither girl, insists practising Christian Aly, has changed much since their Disney days: “Nobody ever told me to take clean parts,” says Ms. Michalka. “They didn’t have to. I never want to make movies that someday, I’d be ashamed to show my kids. There are restrictions in that world, but that isn’t one of them for me.”
 Restrictions?
“Yeah,” she nods. “Like the paparazzi. You soon learn that if you’re having a bad hair day, it’s better to stay indoors.”
Isn’t that just a tad oppressive, I wonder?
“Maybe. But it’s easier than getting papped and dealing with the photograph.”
Bandslam, we‘re delighted to report, is merely the opening gambit from Ms. Michalka’s master plan. In the coming months, she’ll be a dorm girl in peril in The Roommate, the English-language debut for Oscar-nominated Danish director Christian E. Christiansen. She will also feature alongside such thespian luminaries as Patricia Clarkson, Thomas Hayden Church, Stanley Tucci and Malcolm McDowell in Easy A, a Heathers-inspired reworking of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.
“It’s so exciting,” laughs the actress. “It’s all I can do to stop myself from asking my co-stars for autographs.”