Jennifer Lawrence Was Missing Teeth For Most Of Filming Don't Look Up

One of my favorite films of the last decade is Park Chan-wook's twisty, sexy masterpiece "The Handmaiden." The one place where I diverge with the many others who also adore that film is that there is a scene in it that makes me deeply uncomfortable, yet everyone else who sees it thinks of it as one of the film's steamiest high points. It involves Kim Tae-ri's character filing down the tooth of Kim Min-hee's character. I understand conceptually why the scene elicits that feeling from most people, as it is difficult to be more intimate with someone than making eye contact with them as your fingers are in their mouth. Unfortunately, it taps into a massive phobia I have, and that is teeth trauma.

Whenever I see a scene in a movie that involves a tooth being pulled, chipped, knocked out, or filed down, I am always squirming in my seat and looking away from the screen. Very few things get that kind of reaction out of me, and usually, it's something major like actual physical harm (or killing) of an animal on screen. A tooth getting knocked out is theoretically nothing compared to that, and yet my phobia remains.

It, of course, comes from a fear of my own teeth being mangled somehow. It's part of the reason I'll never bite down on a piece of hard candy. Worked out well for me so far. Well, the same can't be said for Jennifer Lawrence. For the disaster movie "Don't Look Up," the visual effects artists had to get a little creative and create some CGI teeth for Lawrence because otherwise there'd have been a large gap in her mouth thanks to an unfortunate encounter with a lollipop.

Snacking can be a dangerous proposition. In my case, it usually means eating far more chips than I should be eating. For Jennifer Lawrence, it turned out to actually cause physical damage. On "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" back in 2021, Lawrence revealed that snacking on a lollipop — or, as someone like her from Kentucky would say, a sucker — caused her to lose a tooth. Well, not exactly a tooth:

"Eating a sucker. It was really stupid. It was a veneer, but if anyone knows what is underneath a veneer, it's much worse. It's like this pointy fang. And so I lost that, and I couldn't go to the dentist because of COVID. So they just CG-ed my tooth."

That sounds bad, but then you realize that veneers don't exactly work like that. You aren't really going to have a single veneer for one tooth, and that's it. On her recent appearance on "Hot Ones," Lawrence clarified the extent of the issue, saying, "It wasn't just one tooth because I have veneers. I had a whole section missing." Of course there are plenty of people in the world who have damaged or are missing teeth, but for a big, glossy, movie star-driven Hollywood production, it would have admittedly been rather distracting to see one of the most famous women in the world on the big screen (or on Netflix for most people) missing teeth for seemingly no reason. 

Adam McKay, who relies quite a lot on improvisation in his filmmaking, maybe could have found a way to make that work, but this sucker incident occurred during production. Stuff had already been shot. Can't see a dentist? Call up the visual effects artists. If only real-life dental problems could be fixed that way ...