Hangover star Ed Helms reveals missing tooth is actually real
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, The Office
Emily Brown
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/ Today / Warner Bros
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, The Office
There are a lot of things in The Hangover movies that seem just too wild and wacky to be true, but Ed Helms' missing tooth is apparently not one of them.
To be fair, having a missing tooth isn't that unusual, but losing that tooth during a horrendously drunken night out that you have absolutely no memory of? That's got to be more of a rare occurrence.
This is the position Helms' character, Stu, finds himself in in the first Hangover movie. He wakes up the morning after the night before, and asks Bradley Cooper's character whether he's missing a tooth.
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He looks in the mirror and is horrified to discover that one of his top front teeth is missing, with what looks to be blood smeared on his remaining teeth.
The missing tooth looks incredibly convincing in the movie, so when Helms appeared on The View this week, Whoopie Goldberg took the opportunity to ask him how it was done - a questions she (and the rest of us) were dying to know.
As it turns out, filmmakers didn't need any kind of special or visual effects - Helms had it covered.
"I never had an adult tooth come in to that spot," he revealed on the show.
"So when we were in pre-production for The Hangover and the director was like, ‘How are we gonna do this missing tooth?’ I said, ‘Well, I have an implant there. Let’s just talk to my dentist'.
“And [the dentist] said, ‘Yeah, we can just take it out.’ [We took] out the implant. So that's what we did."
For the scenes which took place before Stu lost his tooth, Helms relied on a 'flipper' to make it look as if he had a full set of pearly whites.
Then, for all the scenes post-night-out, he was 'just toothless'.
Goldberg expressed her shock over the revelation, explaining she'd been wanting to ask Helms about the tooth since she first saw the Hangover because she 'could not figure it out'.
“Whoopi, I don’t mess around," Helms joked in response. "I am committed. I get in there. I will remove body parts. Whatever it takes. I’m in.”
Helms' appearance on the show comes as he prepares to star in a new movie, Family Switch, which he stars in alongside, Jennifer Garner.
Like a pumped-up version of Freaky Friday, this isn't just two people switching places - it's the entire family, allowing Helms to revisit his inner teenager as his character swaps places with his own child.
It's a fun premise, but I imagine most people would rather have a hangover and a missing tooth than have to go through their teenage years all over again...