Since his viral video in 2021, fans have had questions over Zac Efron‘s face and if he’s had any plastic surgery done. Well, after a year of rumors over his face, Zac has broken his silence and explained the real reason he looks so different to fans.
Speculation over what happened to Zac Efron‘s face and if he had plastic surgery started in April 2021 when he appeared in Bill Nye’s “Earth Day Musical” special for Facebook Watch, which led to questions from fans over his chin. “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO ZAC EFRON LMAO, looks like he got stung by a bee,” Twitter user @KingAmadDiallo wrote at the time. Other users compared Zac’s face to The Weeknd’s prosthetics in his “Save Your Tears” music video. “Zac Efron was way too inspired by The Weeknd‘s face shape,” another user wrote.
Zac’s friend, Australian talk show host Kyle Sandilands, defended him at the time, denying that he had any plastic surgery. “I would know if he’d had any plastic surgery,” Sandilands said in an episode of the “The Kyle and Jackie O Show” podcast at the time “It’s like getting a Picasso and having a kid finger paint all over it. Why bother?” While he hasn’t spoken much about his face, Zac has been open about the pressure to maintain a certain physique level, especially after his body transformation for 2017’s Baywatch. “I realized that when I was done with that movie, I don’t ever want to be in that good of shape again,” Zac said in an interview on Hot Ones in April 2020. “You’re working with almost no wiggle room, right? You’ve got things like water under your skin that you’re worrying about, making your six-pack into a four-pack. Shit like that it’s just not … it’s just stupid.”
But back to Zac Efron‘s face. So what happened to Zac Efron’s face? Read on for his response to the plastic surgery rumors and what he’s said about why his face looks different.
What happened to Zac Efron’s face?
Image: Getty Images. Zac Efron in 2012 (Left) before jaw accident and in 2022 (Right).
What happened to Zac Efron‘s face? Zac responded to rumors he underwent plastic surgery for his face in an interview with Entertainment Tonight in September 2022. In the interview, Zac called the rumors “funny” and explained that his different-looking face was due to a jaw injury in 2013—not surgery. “My mom told me. I never really read the internet, so, I don’t really care,” he said.
He continued, “It was funny. It sucks. I almost died, but we’re good.” Zac broke his jaw and had to have his mouth wired shut after he was running through his house in socks, slipped, hit his face on the granite corner of a fountain and lost consciousness. When he woke up, his chin bone was hanging off his face, according to Men’s Health. The injury also came around the time he tore his ACL, dislocated his shoulder, broke his wrist and threw out his back.
Zac told the magazine in September 2020 that he does physical therapy to rehabilitate the injury, but he stopped for a time, which caused facial issues. He also explained to the magazine that the muscles in his face work together “like a symphony,” so the masseter muscles in his face, which are used for chewing, had to overcompensate for his other facial muscles not being as strong.
While he was in Australia from 2020 to 2021, Zac took a break from his physical therapy. Around that time, he also recorded a video for Bill Nye’s “Earth Day Musical” special for Facebook Watch, where fans noticed that his chin looked different. “The masseters just grew,” he says. “They just got really, really big.” Zac told Men’s Health that he wasn’t even aware of the response to the size of his jaw until his mother called to ask if he had undergone plastic surgery. As for the rumors, Zac told Men’s Health, “If I valued what other people thought of me to the extent that they may think I do,” he adds, “I definitely wouldn’t be able to do this work.”
Image: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images.
As for his body, Zac revealed Men’s Health at the time that he started suffering from insomnia and depression after his physical transformation for 2017’s Baywatch. “I started to develop insomnia, and I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time,” he said. “Something about that experience burned me out. I had a really hard time recentering.”
He continued, “Ultimately they chalked it up to taking way too many diuretics for way too long, and it messed something up.” Zac told Men’s Health that it wasn’t until 2022 that he started to feel like his old self again. “That Baywatch look, I don’t know if that’s really attainable,” he said. “There’s just too little water in the skin. Like, it’s fake; it looks CGI’d. And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve. So I don’t need to do that.” He continued, “I much prefer to have an extra, you know, 2 to 3 percent body fat.”
Zac also spoke about his regret over his Baywatch body in a 2020 episode of Hot Ones. “It’s just stupid. It’s just not real. I’m happy that it worked, I’m happy that it got me through it,” he said. “Take care of your heart, take care of your brain, you’re good.”
As for his dating life, Zac told Cosmopolitan in 2017 that he often asks his younger brother, Dylan Efron, for relationship advice. “If I’m dating someone, one of the few people I need to weigh in on the situation is my brother,” he said at the time. “We live together, and we’re different in a lot of ways, but he’s really grounded. He lived a more normal life than I did growing up, so he’s a great barometer for me. He’ll be like, ‘Are you sure you’re happy? Is this what you really want?’ Having my little brother around is a really great thing.
Zac wished Dylan, who is four years younger than him, a happy birthday in an Instagram post in 2019. “Happy birthday @dylanefron! Honestly, I never in my wildest dreams, would’ve thought that the little terror, devil, monster that was my little brother would turn into my very best friend. I’m so proud of the man you are today. Let’s save the world together- one waterfall at a time. Love ya little brother!” he captioned an Instagram photo of them in a waterfall.
Zac starred in The Iron Claw, an A24 biopic about the Von Erich wrestling family of the 80s, and the actor had to undergo a huge physical transformation, too. “In the best way possible, I did not look anything like me. It was jarring at first, but we kind of put it together piece by piece,” Efron told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s Los Angeles premiere.
“Individually, the wig by itself looks kind of ridiculous; by themselves, the clothes look pretty crazy. When you put them all together in the sets that our team built and get out there in the ring under those lights, it looks like the Von Erichs, man, and that was our goal. I think it added a lot to it.”
