Last week’s episode of “Zac Efron Condomgate” was probably the most entertaining thing surrounding the upcoming release of The Lorax. At the time, Kaiser, CB, and myself all decided to ignore the story because Kaiser had already covered Zac’s bad hair, and talking about the orange carpet again seemed like a waste of space since no one really cares about Zac Efron. So here’s the gist of it if you haven’t already heard: Zac was walking the carpet and pulled something out of his pocket to hand to his publicist, but a condom fell out as well. The guy looked mortified albeit giggly and scooped up the offending item as quickly as possible. However, this wasn’t just any condom — it was a gold wrapped one — this led to the conclusion that Zac was packing the Magnum variety, which is used by guys who are either larger than average or want people to think they’re larger than average. Here’s video evidence of the event:

This morning, Zac appeared on “The Today Show” and spoke to Matt Lauer, who decided that a hard-hitting angle would work best on this story. The video clip on that interview is acting up, but it’s available here, and here are some excerpts:

[W]hen TODAY’s Matt Lauer confronted Lorax star (and prophylactic owner) Zac Efron about the gaffe, he got a little blush from the 24-year-old actor — and a safe sex message in return.

But first he had to get him to say anything: Lauer asked Zefron to “take me through what happened” and the actor chuckled, rubbing his mouth, and said: “I don’t want to take you through it.”

Lauer persisted, and Efron admitted he did drop something: “I never really had a pocket-checking policy when I was going on the red carpet before, but now we’ve fully instated one.”

So Lauer spelled it out: “You dropped a — a condom on the red carpet.”

“That was really hard for you to say!” shot back Efron, laughing.

Clearly, educational opportunities abound in this film; as Lauer noted over the condom-dropping incident, it’s better to be safe than sorry about such matters.

“That’s a great message,” said Efron. “To add to the many messages in the film.”

[From Today]

So was it all an accident? While we were talking about this last week, Kaiser pointed out that if Miley Cyrus had dropped a condom, everyone would probably be labelling it as a famewhore move. In this case, we’re all just speculating whether Zac really wears a Magnum. In an interesting (and almost certainly fictional) twist, the National Enquirer has printed a story (via The Superficial) that maintains that Zac did it on purpose, and he cunningly dropped a large-girth condom to impress his Paperboy co-star, Nicole Kidman because he “knew reports of the incident would get back to her” and “wanted to let her know what kind of man he really is.” Because allegedly, Zac has claimed that if Nicole wasn’t taken, “he’d put the moves on her hard.” Priceless.

Naturally, Gossip Cop has talked to a few unnamed Efron sources who claim the story is crap, but we don’t need any (non-)verification to tell us the truth on this matter. If Zac called 49-year-old Demi Moore a “creepy cougar“ for hitting on him, I doubt he’s wasting evenings at home daydreaming of 44-year-old Nicole. Besides, Nicole is happily married to Keith Urban, and before that, she was married to Tom Cruise, who may or may not be the owner of Hollywood’s smallest p3nis. So I doubt she’s a size queen. This story is almost worth it for the humor value though.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet