{"id":125953,"date":"2025-11-07T01:08:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T01:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/125953\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T01:08:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T01:08:07","slug":"some-stars-are-the-molar-opposite-of-bland-or-forgettable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/125953\/","title":{"rendered":"Some stars are the molar opposite of bland or forgettable"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n NAT FAXON is not a name I thought I\u2019d be writing about. It is the most American name ever. From the family of patriotic monosyllabics, Nat, Ched, Hank, Skip, Chuck, Honk, Bink, Clank. A name of a 1990s golfer known for colourful trousers.<\/p>\n

But right now he\u2019s sort of my hero. He\u2019s the romantic lead of Apple TV show Loot, about a billionaire divorc\u00e9e who falls for an ordinary Joe.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s my hero because of his teeth. They are\u2026 and brace yourself\u2026 not perfect. American teeth are frequently like American Midwest states. All the same size, perfectly straight lines between them, and very white. For reference, my teeth are more like countries after the fall of an empire \u2014 independent, run-down, bloodshed on the borders.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Nat Faxon stands out. He has crooked front teeth. If ever there was a name of a man who had perfect teeth, it would be Nat Faxon. To be clear, his teeth are perfectly fine. He would have had the fifth-best teeth in Ireland for most of our history up until the early 2000s.<\/p>\n

But if you google Nat Faxon, the second result that comes up in the suggested answers is \u2018Nat Faxon teeth\u2019. He been in rakes of TV shows, written others, he has won an Oscar for writing The Descendants. And still people fixate on his teeth.<\/p>\n

In a time of inclusivity on TV, along with hairy backs, crooked teeth seem to be the final frontier. There are so few non-straight non-white teeth. Not even a bit of magnolia. Once you go searching for stars with teeth they pop out of the woodwork. Mainly for toothy gaps. Madonna, Elijah Wood, Anna Paquin, Woody Harrelson. But the toothy gaps are generally seen as the acceptable face of imperfect teeth. It\u2019s cute. It\u2019s a feature. And there\u2019s probably a quota. But good old-fashioned bockety teeth are rarer. Kirsten Dunst has a good set of \u2018naturals\u2019. And slowly the obsession seems to be breaking them down. The barriers, not the teeth.<\/p>\n

\"ActorActor Steve Buscemi arrives for the premiere of HBO’s television series “Boardwalk Empire” Season 4 in New York, September 3, 2013.<\/p>\n

Aimee Lou Wood from Sex Education and The White Lotus made a decision in 2020 to just go for it and leave her teeth alone and in fact highlight them. And it\u2019s worked out. They are good old-fashioned sticky-out-in-fronty teeth. And she looks great.<\/p>\n

The king of them all is Steve Buscemi. He famously said a cosmetic dentist had offered to fix his teeth but declined as it would actually cost him work at this stage. Because he has sort of played the flawed, often downright crooked, anti-hero or hero-adjacent throughout his career. If he got his teeth done, he simply wouldn\u2019t be believable. He\u2019d be Brad Buscemi.<\/p>\n

\n Why are we so troubled by crooked teeth?<\/p>\n

I have them. I may have been born too early for free braces and we didn\u2019t have the money for paid ones. So they remain as they always were… sticky-outy and crooked. And I\u2019ll leave them like that.<\/p>\n

I like to measure the overbite with an apple. Please tell me I\u2019m not the only one who does that.<\/p>\n

But even I find it hard to look at crooked teeth on TV. Is it the sheer scarcity of them? For years, a winning smile has been a sign of health, wealth, success, and discipline. Crooked, discoloured teeth seem associated with bad living and untrustworthiness on TV.<\/p>\n

Ironically, hundreds of years ago it was the poor who had better teeth because they didn\u2019t have access to sugar. In Tudor times, women would blacken their teeth to look rich. In fact, teeth blackening was a beauty treatment that goes back much farther than teeth whitening. In Japan, India, Southeast Asia, teeth blackening was done to differentiate humans from the savage white teeth of animals.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll be a while before we see that on TV, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NAT FAXON is not a name I thought I\u2019d be writing about. It is the most American name…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[74266,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-125953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-colm-o","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}