You can revisit the funny scene here:
Video credit: open666
Hollywood special effects have definitely gone a long way. Both prosthetic and CGI has progressed to the point that they seamlessly blend in with reality, bringing to life fantastic worlds and creatures to the point that viewers often have difficulty determining what is real and what is just a green screen.
In fact, most people just accept that anything that looks really crazy on screen is likely just some CGI wizardry that the special effects department cooked up.
However, sometimes nothing beats doing something for real and the feat only becomes more impressive once people find out.
Such was the case for Ed Helms when he was filming The Hangover. The actor portrayed Stu the dentist in the film and there’s one memorable scene where Stu wakes up to find his tooth inexplicably missing. It would have been easy to attribute the missing tooth to CGI but it turns out Helms actually had his tooth yanked out for the movie!
Fortunately, it wasn’t his real tooth but an implant that was placed there when he was a teenager.
In an interview with PEOPLE back in 2009 when the movie was initially released, the 45-year-old actor said of the scene: “It is totally real. I have an implant. An adult tooth never came in and when I was 16, they did a permanent implant.”
In case you already forgot, the story is set in Las Vegas about a group of friends who wake up from a bachelor party gone awry. For starters, the groom is missing and they also managed to pick up Mike Tyson’s pet tiger and, somehow, a baby along the way.
Stu, played by Helms, also discovers he’s missing one of his front teeth and spends the rest of the movie gap-toothed. And to achieve that effect, the simplest solution was to just remove Helms’ implanted tooth altogether.
“We started to do different tests with prosthetic and blacking it out and nothing worked,” Helms continued.
“I wasn’t eager to take out my implant because my mouth is healthy, but I talked to my dentist and he was like, ‘Yeah we can do it!’
“My dentist was really into it.”
But to do that, the actor’s dentist needed to break off the crown to unscrew the implant. This left a huge hole in the gum that would have been unsanitary (because it would have let food and as well as bacteria lodge directly into the gums). That’s why the dentist screwed in a patch that matched the gum tissue.
Helms carried on like this for the three months that they filmed the movie and got a replacement implant once they were all done.
Now that’s what you call dedication!
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